


Ring Them Bells

by kirazi



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Actually Pretty Fluffy in the End tbh, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And More Importantly So Does Brienne, Angst, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Fix-It, Fuck Canon, Getting Back Together, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Jaime Lannister is an Emotional Garbage Fire But He Still Deserves Better, Major Character Injury, POV Alternating, Post-Canon, Working it Out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-03-13 13:24:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 38,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18941893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirazi/pseuds/kirazi
Summary: His mouth is set in an unhappy line, and she knows he hears it as a sentence she’s passing on him, a just punishment for his crimes.Good, she thinks,yes. I sentence you to live. Live, and find a way to come to terms with it. Live, and never make me watch you ride to your own grave again.(Jaime rings the bells, and from there, the future unfolds differently. A story about two tired knights on a slow boat to Tarth, working things out.)





	1. Preface: Time is Running Backwards (Brienne)

**Author's Note:**

> So, (show) canon endgame is a flaming dumpster and I'm joining the rest of you here on the barricades to fix it. This one takes place mostly post-canon, with a little overlap in the early chapters. Story follows show canon through 8x04, and then remixes elements of 8x05 and 8x06 in order to head off someplace different and better, I hope. While I have borrowed some details of geography and nomenclature from assorted wikis, this otherwise makes no effort to align itself with book canon.
> 
> In contrast to the relatively functional and reasonably articulate versions of these two I wrote for the post-8x03 Winterfell Sequence, characterizations here are based on the considerably more fucked-up and emotionally illiterate (i.e. Jaime in particular) people we saw in 8x04. So there will be some deep dives into their respective trauma, and an attempt to reckon seriously with his feelings for Cersei and the impact of that relationship. Consider this a content warning for mild suicidal ideation and references to past emotional abuse, but I'm leaving off the tags because there's no physical self-harm depicted here, and no major violence or character deaths beyond what occurred in the final episodes—minus the death of a certain golden idiot. 
> 
> Chapter titles from the lyrics to "Ring Them Bells"; I like [this Sarah Jarosz cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC3OrYxv_wo) but you can pick whichever one's your fave. And thanks to Ro Nordmann for the lovely cover image!

Everything hurts. Her legs hurt, her arms hurt, her head hurts. Her heart hurts. They give her milk of the poppy and she sinks under it, but the pain remains, obdurate. Her throat is burning with dust and ashes, and when she surfaces again, she’s screaming.

“Arya!”

It’s not the first time she’s screamed that name through bloody teeth, though she can’t quite recall why—there’s a flickering impression of rocks, a mountainside, the smell of blood and crushed grass—but this time, unlike that one, someone answers.

“I’m here.” The girl’s voice is low and determined; she sounds uninjured, if shaken, and it’s worrisome that Arya Stark can sound shaken—the girl who killed the Night King, and never wept, not in the battle or at the burials, at least not where Brienne could see—but the voice is there, and it calms what little is left of her beneath the suffocating fog of the pain. She can’t open her eyes, she realizes, or maybe she has opened them, and there’s nothing but darkness left to see.

“I’m here,” the girl says again, sounding steadier now. “We made it out. Now you need to rest.”

She comes out of it, here and there, over the indefinite span of time that follows, but never fully, only enough to collect a jumble of impressions: lamplight flickering against canvas; foul smells, of blood and shit and burnt flesh; low voices she can’t recognize, and the one she does—Arya, who’s alive, _we made it out_ , who's still here; hands forcing bitter liquids down her throat, followed by the cool relief of water; more pain. She doesn’t know where she is or how long it’s been since—since whatever happened. And then suddenly there’s the light pressure of a hand resting on hers, and a smell that’s familiar, that’s good, one that she remembers drawing in with deep breaths, mingled with woodsmoke and sweat, huddled under a blanket of furs. She lets it send her back, away from whatever terrible present she’s trapped in now, to the comforting memory of shared nights in a warm bed: a bubble she can rest in, without recalling what followed. It soothes her, enough to almost forget about the pain, and she sinks back into a dreamless darkness, giving herself over to its embrace.

Later, when she finally comes to something like consciousness—still hazy and drugged—it’s gone, and there’s a different cool hand stroking her brow, as gentle as the mother she only remembers in fragments and wordless impressions. She opens her eyes, and Sansa is there, sad-eyed and smiling. “Welcome back,” she says, and Brienne draws air into her aching lungs, and arms herself, inwardly, to face the next battle: the future that’s been waiting for her to wake into it.


	2. When the Game is Through (Jaime)

It’s Tyrion who finds him, when it’s all over, kneeling in the blood pooled on the flagstones beneath the crumpled heap of skin and hair and silk brocade that had been their sister.

“Jaime,” he says, hoarse and awful, “Jaime, get up.”

He can’t. He’s fixed there like a statue, bent over his knees, holding her hand, her flesh still warm around the broken fingers.

“She jumped,” he says, his voice strange in his mouth, his mind filled with the image of her shape at the window, her face too far away for him to see it clearly. Had she thought of Tommen, when she'd made her final choice, as she took that last step? Was she with him now, somewhere beyond everything? Or still falling, endlessly, while he was still here, a remnant in the world after she’d left it, a thing he’d never fully believed possible. Or perhaps they were all together in hell, already; hell had come to them, and the rest of the city in their wake.

“The dragon was headed for the keep, and she—Tyrion, _the dragon_ ,” he says, still unable to grasp what he’d seen. It had been awful enough to watch that force wielded on the battlefield, at the Gold Road and in Winterfell, but to see it unleashed on a city full of ordinary people, _innocents_ , not soldiers or wights, but old men and women and frightened children—he’d thought the army of the dead was the greatest horror he’d ever possibly witness, and he’d been wrong.

“I know,” Tyrion tells him. “You have to get up, come on, there’s no time. They’ll be looking for you.”

“How did you—"

“One of my informers saw you sneaking past our lines and into the city gates. Jaime, come on, it’s not safe, you have to hide.”

“We can’t leave her,” he says, bewildered.

“We have to. They need to find the body. It will be worse for the survivors if they don’t, if they think she’s escaped or she’s hiding somewhere.”

He can’t bear it, the thought of her displayed like a prize, her head sawn off and spiked atop a wall. He’s always protected his sister, like he’s protected his brother, even from the things they’d deserved. He can’t just stop, now.

“She’s gone, Jaime. Nothing they do can hurt her anymore.”

As Tyrion speaks, he remembers saying it to Cersei, saying it about poor sweet Myrcella, and the act of remembering jars him out of his shock enough to look at his brother, whose face is a mask of horror and grief—not only for the loss of a sister, he realizes, the loss Tyrion had long expected, but for the rest, too: what his beloved queen has done, the city in ashes around them and the dream reduced to ash along with it.

His brother’s hand is on his shoulder. He nods, then, and stands, and lets himself be guided away, through the rubble at the foot of the Red Keep, through streets filled with smoke and blood and the smell of burning flesh, into a cellar and a tunnel below it, all the way to a dim cavern that smells faintly of the sea. They stop at a dark archway set into the walls, where there’s some sacking and straw and a barrel of water.

“Wait here. I’ll come at night, or send someone for you,” Tyrion tells him, so Jaime nods, wordless, and watches his small form recede down the tunnel, moving slowly, like the weight of half a million souls presses down on his shoulders. He’s almost disappeared from view by the time Jaime passes out. 

Tyrion doesn’t come back at nightfall, or at dawn. Jaime doesn’t know how much time has passed, or how much of it he’s been awake for—he goes in and out, wonders if he’s dying, wonders if he cares. He could slit his wrists, he supposes, or his throat, but it seems that he’s misplaced his sword at some point in the past day that he can’t recall, and his brother had asked him to wait. So that’s what he does, wondering if it will be Tyrion or the Stranger who comes for him first.

It’s neither. The face that comes out of the darkness is a girl’s, smudged with bruises and scabbed cuts under her strong brows, and it takes him a moment to recognize Arya Stark standing before him, a candle in her hand.

“Can you walk?” she asks.

Jaime nods, and rises to his feet, aching and unsteady. Her gaze is wary, evaluating, but something in it is a little less cold and calculating than he remembers from the way she’d watched him at Winterfell—she looks younger, now, more uncertain, more human.

“Follow me,” she tells him, one Kingslayer to another, so he does. It’s a long walk through the tunnels, and neither speaks. They come out by the city walls, or what’s left of them, and she guides him to a large tent, where his brother and Davos Seaworth and Jon Snow are gathered. All of them look grim and exhausted, marked with a kind of despair that hadn’t been present even in the wreck of Winterfell amid the battle with the dead.

“What were you doing in the city?” Seaworth asks him, leaden.

Jaime’s not sure if he still has the capacity for words, but before he can try to muster any, Arya speaks up instead, from behind him.

“He rang the bells,” she says. “I saw him.” He feels Snow’s gaze settle on him like a physical weight. He nods.

“I begged her to surrender,” he says. “She wouldn’t listen, so I left the keep and went to the nearest bell tower.” He’d seized the ropes in his own hands, flesh and metal both, calling all the men and women in earshot to come help, and they’d pulled until their hands were raw. He looks down at his left palm, now, sees torn flesh under the caked blood and ash. Once he could hear the jangled chorus echoing clear across the city, he’d left them to it, racing back down the stairs and through the streets to the point where the keep met the city walls and the tunnels burrowed down to the sea below. But he was too late, fire already churning down from the sky and screams thickening the air, and he’d reached the wall just in time to look back up at the tower and see Cersei step to the window, silhouetted against the sky.

“You’re sure it was him,” says Snow, and Arya looks exasperated. “He’s not an easy man to mistake,” she says. “I saw him go up the tower, waving his gold hand, calling for people to help, and the bells started ringing a minute later.”

Jaime waits, dully, for Snow to order his arrest or execution or something. It doesn’t matter, really, at this point: the bells had been for nothing. He hadn’t saved the city, and his sister had died alone, and the child—if it existed, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to examine her body closely enough to be sure—had died with her. He’s failed them all.

Arya’s still arguing with her brother, somewhere. “No, it was after I left the Hound at the keep. I didn’t stick around to watch, I ran down to Flea Bottom—that’s where I was when Brienne found me,” and Jaime’s head snaps up like an arrow released from the bow.

“What?” he says, hoarse. His ears are playing tricks on him. He must have taken some blow to the head, in the tumult, breathed in more smoke than air. He’s dizzy. He’s hearing her wrong. But they’re all turning back to him, and he sees it in their faces, and his stomach hurls itself into his throat.

Tyrion looks at Arya, in the resulting silence. “Is she still—"

“She’s alive,” the girl replies. “Barely.”

Jaime’s head is ringing, like he’s still in the bell tower, an awful clanging all around him, so loud he can’t think. Tyrion’s the one who explains it to him, gentle and terrible. “Lord Bran had a vision, of his sister trapped in the city, under fire. So Lady Sansa sent Ser Brienne”—the dragon’s claws are inside him, now, tearing him from gut to gullet—“to find her and bring her out safely.” 

“Which she did,” Arya says. “But a wall came down on us while we were coming out of the gate.”

Jaime tries to say something, but the words are trapped in his torn throat; whatever comes out is mangled, the meaning lost. She was in Winterfell, he’d kept her in Winterfell, kept her safe amid the snow and ice of the north, weeping in a courtyard, unforgivably wounded, but _safe_.

A look passes from Tyrion to Arya, and from Arya to her brother, and Jon Snow sighs and turns away, in search of more pressing matters, although Seaworth’s eye lingers, suspicious.

“I’ll take you to her,” his brother tells him.

The walk across the fields to the knot of tents where the maesters are tending the wounded is slow and awful. “They said her chances were good, if she made it through the night,” Tyrion explains. “That was a day ago—Arya stayed with her until morning—and she’s still breathing. It may be some time before she wakes, but there’s good reason to hope.” It’s hard to know whether Tyrion is embellishing, trying to give him something to hold on to, a reason not to walk to the edge of the Blackwater and just keep walking until the water takes him. But even if it’s halfway to a lie, it’s enough, so he keeps putting one foot in front of another until he’s there, at her cot, sinking to the ground beside it, eyes fixed on her pale face like it’s the only thing pinning him to this earth. Her eyes are still, under the closed lids, the hollows beneath them purple with bruising. He can see bandages wound tight around her chest, under the thin sheet, a splint on her lower left leg and another on her arm, with smaller splints holding the swollen fingers of her left hand straight. Her right hand, _her sword hand_ , is unmarred, limp on the cot beside her. He covers it with his own, feeling the faint thrum of her pulse under his fingertips. She’s breathing evenly, but she’s deep in poppy sleep, won’t hear anything he could say. So he just sits there, holding her hand—it’s not as warm as it should be, not as warm as he remembers it feeling, pressed to his chest—and prays to every god that’s already forsaken him.

A sennight passes like that, and half of another. He sleeps curled up on the ground in her tent, just a few unrestful hours every night, broken by bad dreams, and leaves only to make space for the maesters that come intermittently to tend to her. Arya Stark shows up at regular intervals to glare at him, so he sits outside while she’s in there with Brienne, and after a day or two, she starts shoving food at him when she comes—bits of dry bread and cured meat, wrinkled apples and carrots, or cold potatoes cooked in the ash of the campfires—and he’s not going to argue with her, not now, so he chokes it down while he waits, and thanks her as she leaves.

He doesn’t pay attention to the events unfolding around him, although news reaches him from time to time regardless: the dragon queen has proclaimed victory; the dragon queen is dead; the dragon is gone. Jon Snow isn’t a Snow—oh gods, what a _liar_  the honorable Ned Stark had been, he almost laughs at the absurdity of it—but nor will he be a Targaryen.

“He refuses to claim it,” Tyrion says, grim. Tyrion’s the one who’s shown up and insisted on filling him in on this particular development, for some reason Jaime can’t fathom. He’s aware, dimly, that his brother is suffering, too, that he’s living through his own separate nightmare at the moment. But there’s nothing he can do to fix that, so he won’t pretend to try. His eyes are focused on some distant point along the ruined ramparts of the city walls, with the sun going down behind them. He turns back to look at his brother, who’s angry with him.

“You should have stayed in Winterfell.” Tyrion’s mouth is a flat, furious line.

“I had to try,” Jaime tells him.

“That’s right, you had to try to get something else to kill you, for the what—the third _and counting_ —time in a year? Is it because you’re just too much of a fucking coward to do it yourself?” Tyrion’s voice is rising to a higher pitch, wretched, like something’s coming undone inside him. “I had to watch you charge _at a fucking dragon_ , Jaime. And since that didn’t work, you chose to let the dead put an end to all your problems, and when by some _miracle_ you survived that, instead of taking it as the gift it was, you decided to throw yourself away again.”

Jaime doesn’t say anything. He just looks at his brother’s face, until it twists, like Tyrion is about to cry. “Fuck you,” his brother says, his voice breaking, and walks away.

A day or two later, a great tumult echoes across the sea of tents and shanties that fill the plain outside the ruined city: the arrival of the remainder of the Northern forces, with those of the Riverlands and Vale at their side. He makes little note of it until a cluster of dark-cloaked men with a glimmer of red hair in their midst comes marching through the tents in his direction—he’s sitting in the dust, picking at Arya’s latest offering—and he recognizes Podrick Payne among them. So that’s where the boy has been. Podrick advances on him, furious as a stormcloud, but Jaime just says, “She’s inside, Arya’s with her,” gesturing at the tent as he stands, and after an ominous pause, Pod steps around him and goes in, leaving him standing in front of Sansa Stark.

“Tell me, Kingslayer,” she says, regal and thin-lipped, “how fares my knight?”

He swallows. “Still unconscious, my lady, but close to waking now, we hope. You’ve had word of all that’s happened, here?”

She nods. “From your brother.” The anger in her eyes is searing, and he almost welcomes it, except the only thing that keeps him on his feet in front of her is the anger kindling inside him in response—because Sansa had _sent her here_ , had undone the one achievement he’d bought with his cruelty.

Before either of them can speak further, Arya appears alongside him, the tent flap closing behind her, and Sansa steps forward to gather her in a tight embrace. They hold each other for a moment, murmuring something he can’t make out, and then break apart. “Come inside,” Arya says. Sansa turns back to look at him, but he’ll never know what she was about to say, because Arya speaks first: “He’s here every day,” she tells her sister, who frowns at them both with something akin to surprise, and lets it drop. She enters the tent, and Arya follows without further comment. Jaime lingers outside, while the maester comes and gives the newcomers all the wretched details—left arm, leg, and hand, all broken, and half her ribs besides, and a blow to the head, but no fever, though, and signs that the stupor is lifting, as they gradually lessen the dose of poppy. Last night she’d been moving more in her sleep, the pattern of her breath changing, her eyes twitching slowly under their lids with what he could only hope were not nightmares. So he’s still standing there, dusk falling around him, when he hears a murmur, and then Arya’s gasp, followed by Sansa’s low voice, saying, “Welcome back.”

He could fall on his knees in thanks. He could walk in and shove them all aside and prostrate himself at her bedside, reach for her hand, bring it trembling to his lips. But Jaime thinks about the last time he’d looked into her wide-open eyes, watching them fill with tears while he ripped them both apart with words, _hateful, and so am I_ —and so he just turns and walks away from the tent, from the camp, into the shattered city. He can’t fix what he’s broken, not unless and until she grants him leave to try. All he can do is keep walking until he finds something else he has half a chance of mending before he's gone.

The messenger comes for him a sennight later, although Jaime’s not sure how exactly the man picks him out among the haphazard work gang clearing streets in Flea Bottom. He’s stripped to the waist and covered in soot, his gold hand bartered away days ago to a blacksmith for a pair of boots that aren't falling apart, and the promise of a functional hook to replace it. Maybe they’d just told the poor bastard to ask every surviving one-handed man in the city.

“Ser Jaime?” The Northern accent comes down the alley, and he can feel a murmur of surprise go up around him as he sets down his bucket and walks over to the interloper—none of his fellows here know him by any title or epithet. _Jaime, my name's Jaime._ That's all he's said about himself to any of them.

“Lady Stark requests I bring you to her chambers for a short audience,” the Northerner tells him, looking like he’d rather bring Sansa his head. Jaime just nods, and walks out of the alley without looking back, following the man uphill. They’ve made progress cleaning things up around the Lion Gate, he notes; people are moving back into some of the more intact stone buildings, now shored up with fresh timber scaffolding. The man escorts him to what was once a great mansion near the gate, now shorter by half a story and missing all its windows, with a direwolf banner hanging from the balcony. He enters, ushered past several ranks of guards, and comes to a large room where Sansa is seated at a long table.

“Lady Stark,” he says, bowing to her.

“Ser Jaime.” She looks him over, a little puzzled, perhaps—he'd scrubbed off the worst of the soot in a broken fountain on the way, and got his shirt and jerkin back on afterwards, but he’s sure he’s still a sight. He wonders why she's not calling him Kingslayer.

“I wished to speak with you about your plans,” Sansa informs him.

“My lady, I have none,” he says, bewildered.

“You must be aware that your brother and Ser Davos and myself have called a kingsmoot of sorts, with my brother's—that is, my cousin’s—agreement, to negotiate a settlement regarding the future of these kingdoms. Some would say that you have a right to a place there, to represent the Westerlands.” Jaime’s already shaking his head, like a cat that’s been spilled with water: an instinctive _no_.

“I wouldn't be among those saying so, Lady Stark. I've renounced my claims; they are my brother’s to take up, if he wishes. Casterly Rock is his, and the Westerlands too, and if he won’t have them, I’m sure some cousin or bannerman of ours will. There must be a handful of them left living.”

“Then what will you do?” Sansa asks. “Remain here in King’s Landing, to rebuild?”

He shakes his head, again. “For a little while, perhaps. After that—let me be a hedge knight, or a simple solider, under someone else’s command. I want no more part in the game of thrones.” He won’t live in the ruins of his father’s dream and his sister’s catastrophe, which had been their children’s catastrophe, too. He doesn’t expect to live very long in any case. He’ll clean up some small corner of the mess he’s helped make, and when he’s done with that, he’ll go to his death quietly.

Sansa regards him, coolly. “You haven’t been back to see Ser Brienne since my arrival,” she observes. “Not once.”

“Your sister has been kind enough to keep me informed,” he tells her. He has no idea how Arya’s been tracking him—ah, so that’s who clued in the messenger—but she appears out of the shadows every other day or so, with some rations and a scowl and a few spare words. “I would not—I don’t wish to disturb her recovery in any way, my lady. I thought it better to keep my distance once she awoke.”

Sansa’s eyes are penetrating, like she’s trying to read something written under his skin, and Jaime briefly wonders which of the Stark girls he finds most unnerving before giving it up for a fool’s question.

“I’ve had a raven from Evenfall,” Sansa says, at length. “Lord Selwyn is distressed to hear of his daughter’s injury, and has invited her to return home to recover there. I have given her leave to go, and expect she will remain there for some time, if not permanently. The Evenstar’s health is fading, if I understand the matter correctly, and Tarth has suffered much from the increase of piracy during these wars and the winter. She may find that she does not wish to return north, once she sees the work awaiting her at home.”

“I see,” Jaime manages to say, between clenched teeth.

“I had hoped to send Arya to accompany her on the voyage, but I’m afraid I will need my sister here for the kingsmoot and whatever comes after,” Sansa continues, and he can’t help but interrupt—“Podrick is capable,” he says, “the boy doesn’t need a minder, not anymore,” and that's one small achievement he can claim, half accident though it was, the gift of someone who had become a loyal follower and a friend.

Sansa shakes her head. “Podrick isn’t going, not yet. He was taken with a fever, back in Winterfell, and was still abed when Ser Brienne left, or I’d have sent him with her then. It seems that while recovering, he formed an _understanding_ with one of the young ladies who nursed him back to health.” There’s a small smile teasing around the corners of Sansa’s mouth, and for a moment, she looks like the young girl she still is, or might have been. “He offered to go directly to Tarth, of course, but Ser Brienne is quite firm in insisting that he return to Winterfell first for the girl—there wasn’t time for a formal betrothal before we left—and take her to the Westerlands to wed her properly, in front of his family, before they travel to join her there.”

Jaime’s breath is coming in short huffs. He can’t—she’s _leaving_ , soon, and maybe never coming back, not even on the way to Winterfell—not that he ever wants to set foot in the fucking North again—and she’s going to go alone, without anyone close to her, anyone who knows the truth of what she’s done, what she’s fought and triumphed over, the price she's paid for it. Without anyone who loves her. It’s unacceptable. It’s _unbearable_ , and he can’t possibly let it happen.

“Let me go,” he says, urgent. “My lady, let me take her home. Please.”

Sansa regards him for a moment longer, like he’s a purchase she’s not sure whether she’s pleased to have made. “I will not object, Ser. But it’s her permission you want, if you wish to join her. Go and ask her yourself.”

“Yes, my lady,” he says, in a voice only a little above a whisper, and retreats.


	3. Us Who are Left (Brienne)

“Ser Brienne?”

She opens her eyes, surfacing from a shallow doze. Tyrion Lannister is standing at the entrance to her sickroom, looking wearier than she’s ever seen him. The Hand’s pin at his doublet is gone, and there are deep shadows under his eyes.

She lifts her right hand, signaling permission to enter, and tries to croak out a greeting, but her mouth is too dry to form the words. He comes over to her bed, and turns to the small table beside it, reaching for the jug of water and pouring a cup. Brienne struggles to lift her head up from the pillow and drink without spilling it, and he puts a hand at the back of her neck to help, holding the cup steady at her lips. It’s unexpected, the quiet gentleness he shows her, and she’s surprised to find it so comforting. It’s not a feeling she associates with his presence.

“Thank you,” she says, her mouth no longer parched, as he sets the cup back down.

“Lady Sansa tells me you are recovering well,” he says. “I am very glad to hear it.”

Brienne wants to grimace, at that, but she holds it in. It doesn’t feel well to her, not at all, but she supposes it’s an improvement on being dead, which by all accounts she nearly was for quite some time.

“Yes,” she says, because she’s not going to complain, at least not in his hearing. She’s still not sure whether she trusts this strange little man, who’s never stopped being a bit of a mystery to her—alternately sincere and mocking, and always with some hidden calculation taking place behind his eyes. Sansa does, within limits, which should be credit enough—Sansa trusts few, and only sparingly—and there had been moments back in Winterfell when she’d glimpsed another side of him, something wistful and warm, his head resting on Jaime’s shoulder, both of them smiling with their eyes as well as their mouths for once. She stifles that memory before it can take her any further.

“I don’t know how fully you’ve been acquainted with recent events,” he says, somber. “The news that Queen Daenerys is dead, and Snow—Targaryen, actually, although he won’t acknowledge it—has refused the throne, or what’s left of it.”

“Yes. Lady Sansa has kept me informed, and Arya as well,” she tells him. The details are all rather blurred, her mind fuzzed by the poppy milk they’re still giving her for the pain, though in smaller doses, and by her inability to fully grasp the passage of time in the days—nearly a month, now—since the fall of the city. She remembers fragments of the desperate flight towards the walls, keeping Arya in front of her, praying that her armor would be enough to shield them both. Then a long darkness broken only by sensations and impressions she can’t fully recall, except that most of them weren't good, and finally, the memory of waking in a tent, in pain, her body half-broken. A few days ago, they’d decided she was better enough to risk moving her to this room in the house near the Lion Gate that Sansa's claimed as temporary Stark quarters. It had been an unpleasant journey—the movement of the stretcher jostling all the hurting places where her bones are growing back together, and each glimpse of the destruction around them reawakening the horrifying memory of watching the city burn. But it’s quieter and cooler here, between these stone walls, and she’s grateful.

Tyrion nods. “Lady Sansa and others are helping arrange a number of meetings,” he continues. “To plan for—the future, I suppose. What comes next. The Dothraki and Unsullied are leaving, for better or worse, so it will fall to the rest of us to come up with a compromise. One that will hold, I hope. I know the Starks will be glad of your counsel in the days and months to come.”

“I am of little use to my lady in this condition, I’m afraid,” she says, cautiously, wondering what question it is he’s not quite stating outright.

“Will you leave her service, then?” Tyrion asks her.

Brienne looks away. “I may return to Tarth,” she tells him. “Not…not permanently, perhaps, but for some time. My father sent a raven asking me to come home, and I have denied him long enough. Lady Sansa has given me leave to go.” She’s not at peace with the decision, yet, but she’s not sure what she wants, now, or how to balance what she owes to the oaths she’s made against what she owes to her father, to her people. And that’s without considering the oaths that went unmade, the ones that remained unspoken, sworn only with glances exchanged, with hands and lips pressed to hot skin, in firelight and battle, amid the distant snows of the north. Those have no claim on her loyalty, but they’ve left their marks on her nonetheless, left her heart sore and wondering.

Tyrion nods, and shuffles his feet. It’s a long time before he speaks again, and then he says, “And what word have you had of my brother?”

Brienne stares past him, fixing her eyes on the window and the late-evening light that leaks through it. “We haven’t spoken,” she tells him.

Tyrion sighs, and scrubs a weary hand over his face.“I had hoped he’d been back to see you, since you woke up,” he says, frowning. “He’s not really speaking to anyone, at the moment. Myself included. I think Arya sees him, from time to time.”

“Is he still here, then?” She can’t help but ask, and resents herself for it, resents Tyrion for giving her someone else to ask it of. The night she’d woken up, Arya had told her that Jaime had survived, and she’d almost wept with relief. But he hadn’t come back—even though Arya said, later, that he’d stayed with her almost constantly while she was unconscious, for nearly a fortnight. She’d refused to ask about him further after that, although she’s gleaned some fragments from Sansa and Arya’s conversation: he’d made it into the keep, he’d rung the bells, he’d seen his sister die. She tries not let her imagination fill in the rest. She’s been trying not to think of him at all, but she hasn’t had much success.

“Yes, he’s in the city, or what’s left of it. Helping clear the rubble, deliver aid. He’d be more useful organizing the work, instead of trying to carry it out one-handed, but he’s refused whatever post or command is offered him, so.” He grimaces and shrugs, waves a hand in the air, as if to say: _you know what he’s like_. She does, or she did, once.

Tyrion exhales, through pursed lips. “Forgive me, my lady, but may I speak frankly? It is churlish to burden you of all people with this, under the circumstances, but—” he breaks off.

“Go ahead,” she says, her chest tight.

“I fear for him,” he says, and it’s written on his face, bleakness and sorrow and terror, all mixed up with a desperate, clinging love. It hurts to see, and it's only now that she really understands it: Jaime's the only one he has left.

“He’s grieving and lost, and try though I might, I cannot find a way to bring him out of it.” He stops for a moment, and then goes on, all in a rush. “I suppose it’s the prerogative, of knights, to put themselves at risk, in service of others, or ideals they hold dear. You know that better than most. Still…my brother was not always so reckless with himself. I’m not sure when that changed. Perhaps it started when he lost his hand” —she blinks, remembering a desperate, left-handed grasp at a sword in the mud, baiting him with the words _coward_ and _giving up_ to make him eat, an unarmed leap into a bearpit—“but I think it was really after Tommen died that it became something else. I think he’s held his life cheap since then. I doubt he expected to survive his arrival at Winterfell, let alone the battle against the dead. But when he did, I finally hoped…." He pauses. “He seemed happy there, when I left,” he says, finally. “I know it, _I know him,_ I saw it. He was happy with you.”

It’s like being stabbed, or being run through with her own sword. It’s like the wall coming down on her again. “I begged him to stay,” she says, in a whisper. It’s a thing she hasn't admitted aloud to anyone, yet, not even to Pod or Sansa, who both must have guessed. “But it wasn’t enough.” The words aren’t enough, either. It’s not really the kind of thing words are sufficient to convey. Screams might do it, possibly, or sobs. But she will permit herself neither, now.

Tyrion’s eyes are sad, watching her. “I’m sorry for that. I’m so sorry for what he’s put you through.”

She shakes her head, wincing at the echo of a headache the motion triggers. She can’t bring herself to be sorry, exactly, for having let Jaime get close, but she doesn’t know how to make sense of where it’s brought her, what it feels like now: the ache of having had him, for a time, then losing him to his own bitter compulsion towards self-destruction, and then, having finally given herself permission to mourn him, learning that he’s still here, still living. But not for her, not with her.

Tyrion is quiet for a while. Then—“Jaime always protected us,” he says, like this is something crucial, the key to a riddle they both need to understand. “Ever since we were children. He protected me, and he protected our sister—from our father, from the world, even from each other, at least to the extent that he could. I don’t think he knew how to—how to stop trying to do that, in the end. Even when he knew it was hopeless.”

That, at least, she can understand. “Nothing’s more hateful than failing to protect those you love,” Brienne tells him, her throat aching.

Tyrion nods. “And now it’s my turn to protect him, and I don’t know how. But—I’m sorry to ask this, I know he’s wronged you, and you have every right to be angry. No one would think otherwise. If you were to spit in his eye, there’s not a person in this city who’d blame you for it. But if any of us can hold him to the world, now, I think you’re the one with the best chance.”

Brienne shuts her eyes, stops the tears from welling up. She refuses to cry in front of another bloody Lannister. “How?” she croaks. “I couldn’t, before. I _tried_.”

Tyrion’s voice is soft. “He was very distressed when he learned you were here, and had been hurt, my lady. It was the first thing that really brought him out of—out of the state I found him in, after.” He doesn’t explain after what, but he doesn’t need to. “Jaime thought—this isn’t conjecture, he said as much—he thought he was protecting you, by leaving you at Winterfell and giving you no reason to follow him south. If you can possibly contrive to find a way for him to protect you now, or merely be of service to you, it might offer him some purpose—a better one than picking up rubble in Flea Bottom, anyway.”

She opens her eyes, finally, and looks at Tyrion, who’s watching her. “I would,” she tells him, and means it, despite everything. “But he isn’t here.”

“He scarcely left your side from the time I brought him to you, until you woke. I expect he’s keeping his distance now because he thinks you don’t wish to see him. Would you permit me to find some way of informing him otherwise, if that’s so? When you are ready?”

 _Yes_ , she thinks. “Not yet,” she tells him, because she isn’t ready; everything is still too garbled, too difficult and exhausting. Everything still hurts too much. “But soon.”

Tyrion nods, and, after a moment, takes her hand, his small, warm fingers giving it a quick squeeze. “Thank you, Ser,” he says, and bows his head to her, before leaving.

It’s a few days later, after she’s finally won the last round of the argument with Pod—who seems to have forgotten that a squire is bloody well supposed to obey his knight's orders—and she’s feeling well enough to sit up and drink some broth, absurdly pleased to be holding the cup herself, when there’s a commotion in the corridor. Amid the clash of Northern accents, there’s another voice, speaking with a sharp-edged tone almost rising to a threat, a voice she will never mistake for any other man’s as long as she lives: _Jaime_.

She sets down the cup, careful, keeping her good hand steady. “Let him in,” she says, loud enough to be heard, and in the brief silence that follows she feels like her heart has stopped in her chest, and her breath along with it.

Then the door is opening, and closing again behind him, and he’s there, standing in front of her, eyes fixed on the floor. He looks awful—he’s lost weight; there are lines in his face she’s sure weren’t there two months ago, when her hands had traced all his features, smiling, and committed them to memory. His hair and beard are ragged, almost halfway to the state they'd been in when she’d first met him, but now streaked full of gray where they'd once been dark with mud. There’s soot around his neck and a new cut just beginning to fade to a scar over his eye. His right sleeve is empty, the false hand gone. There’s no sword at his waist.

She can’t speak, and for a long moment, neither does he. Then he falls to his knees by the bed. “Ser,” he says, and it sounds like the crack of ice over running water, breaking in the first hour of a thaw.

“I thought you were _dead_ ,” she tells him, because it’s the only thing she can think to say. It’s the only thing she can think of at all, seeing him here—wrecked, grim-faced,  _alive_ —before her.

“I expected to be,” he says, still not meeting her eyes. “I have no right to beg your forgiveness—”

“Don’t,” she interrupts him, because it’s unbearable, the look on his face. She closes her eyes to keep it at bay, takes a deep breath, as deep as the binding around her ribs will permit. When she opens them again, he’s finally looking at her directly, and the shock of it feels like a burn: fire or ice, she’s not sure which one.

“What will you do now?” she asks him.

He exhales slowly, like it hurts him to breathe too. “Lady Stark tells me you will set sail for Tarth as soon as you are well enough to take ship.”

She’s not sure what he’s trying to imply. She nods.

“She tells me Podrick is not accompanying you—” he sounds almost angry about it, and she’s _done_ having this discussion with Pod or _anyone else_ , so she interrupts, again: “He’ll join me there later, when his obligations in the north and at home are settled. I told him I wouldn’t permit him to come any sooner.” She’s happy for Pod, and glad to see that he seems to have every intention of doing the honorable thing. But she won’t let him delay it to come with her now, and if she’s honest with herself, there’s a small part of her that can’t quite bear the thought of his lovesick presence on the voyage. It cuts too close to the bone, seeing the way his face lights up when he thinks of Rosmund, who’s waiting for him in Winterfell.

“So I understand,” Jaime replies, like someone’s filled him in on the details. So _why_ is he making her explain it again? She’s suddenly furious with him, her cheeks flaring with it.

He pauses, possibly seeing that, then speaks again. “If you will permit me—I would see you there safely, my lady. Ser.”

Brienne’s mind is reeling; whatever she’s been expecting him to say, it wasn’t that. But then she remembers Tyrion, and his curious roundabout plea for permission to—to what, press Sansa to prompt Jaime to propose this?

“Surely you have—obligations, here or elsewhere,” she says, slowly.

Jaime shakes his head. “There’s nothing left for me here,” he tells her. “I have renounced my titles and claims. Casterly Rock is my brother’s, and I wish him joy of it.” There’s a bitter edge to that, and she wonders if he’s talking to her, or to the ghost of his father. He continues, almost pleading. “I have no plans for the future, save for—I would escort you to Tarth, see you safely home to your father’s hall. If you will grant me that.” He bows his head, as if he’s waiting for the blow, and she realizes that he expects to be refused, possibly even to be dismissed from her presence forever. There’s a part of her, still snarling with hurt and fury, that wants to give him what he expects, and more. But she thinks of his brother’s eyes, his brother’s words.  _It might offer him some purpose._

“All right,” she tells him, watching as his head comes up, startled, to meet her gaze. “On one condition,” she adds.

“Whatever you wish,” he says, a little slow, like he’s still grasping hold of it, the fact that she’s telling him yes.

“Promise me that you’ll take no step, now or in future, to seek or arrange your death.” His eyes flash, and he opens his mouth to say something, but she cuts him off, resolute. “I mean it. You can die of a fever or old age or fighting when we’re boarded by pirates, but you _do not get to choose it_. Those are my terms. I want your word, Ser.”

His mouth is set in an unhappy line, and she knows he hears it as a sentence she’s passing on him, a just punishment for his crimes. _Good_ , she thinks, _yes_. I sentence you to live. Live, and find a way to come to terms with it. Live, and never make me watch you ride to your own grave again.

Eventually, he nods his acceptance. “You have my word,” he tells her, his mouth twisting, and rises, bowing his head again in a wordless farewell. She remains upright, silent and trembling, until the door closes behind him, and only then does she lay down and let the tears finally come, scalding her cheeks and dampening the pillow.


	4. With an Iron Hand (Jaime)

“It’s not as pretty,” the blacksmith says, tightening the leather straps of the cuff, “but it’ll be a damn sight more useful, aboard ship.” Jaime nods, twisting his wrist to watch how the cast-iron hook moves with it. It has a sharp point—he’ll need to see about getting a cover made for the tip—that will serve as a weapon, or allow him to spear bits of food, and he’ll need to test it, first, but he thinks it might hold enough weight to let him climb two-handed, up a tree if not a wall. At least he won’t need a blade the next time he wants to stab something, which comes as a soothing thought. He thanks the blacksmith, and heads out of the forge and back uphill towards the Lion Gate.

The ruined city is starting to show signs of life, like seedlings shooting up from a burned-over plain, or maggots making fast work of a bloated corpse. The bodies have been cleared away, buried or burned again more thoroughly, and the wind off the bay has finally scoured their stink from the streets, although there's still a faint smell of smoke lingering acrid in the air. People are camping amid the ruins while they rebuild what they can: canvas plundered from the sails of Euron Greyjoy’s former fleet now covers the gaps where roofs and windows are missing, and timbers salvaged from the wrecked ships shore up what’s left of the stone buildings, or sketch out the skeletons of new structures to replace them. He wonders what it will all look like two or three decades from now: a different city than the one he remembers, but a living one, even so. He'd asked Tyrion, who’s finally speaking to him again, if they’d considered abandoning the capital altogether, given the scale of the damage—King’s Landing has been sacked before, notably by their father, but Tywin’s forces had been under strict orders to leave the walls and the buildings more or less intact, if not the people and things within them. “It will take a fortune, and more years than either of us are likely to see,” Tyrion said, “but the harbor’s strategic value is too great to just give it up. Squatters and pirates would take it over within a generation, and build it back into a stronghold, and then whoever comes after us will have to go to the trouble of taking it back from them. So we may as well do the job now.” They’re talking about making a temporary capital for a few years at Duskendale, if the Seven Kingdoms are still united once the kingsmoot is over, but that’s all in the future, and while the lords plot their next moves on the chessboard, the smallfolk are reclaiming the broken city themselves. The faint sound of hammering echoes all around, and it follows him up the road to the house with the direwolf banner.

He’s still uneasy inside, although the guards and bannermen know by now to let him pass unhindered, except by foreboding looks and the occasional muttered insult. He doesn’t sleep here, but he stops by almost every day, to help make plans for the voyage and seek Brienne’s approval of the arrangements she’s allowed him to handle. When he reaches the second floor and knocks at her door, he hears a familiar clash of voices inside, and sighs. The humorless maesters have no patience at all for their stubborn charge’s intentions to get out of bed ahead of the schedule they've prescribed. When Podrick opens the door and waves him in, Jaime strives to let his face convey an air of solidarity with Brienne’s increasingly aggravated protests, while privately and silently giving fervent thanks for the tyranny that governs the sickroom. She’s still so fragile, just barely held together; she can’t even walk more than three steps at a time, and the dark hollows under her eyes still look like bruises. It’s torment to be in the same room as her, suffocating under the polite formality with which they address one another these days, and it’s torment to be anywhere else, not knowing how she’s faring. 

She and Maester Althwyn are having it out; the maester’s saying "I _must_ insist, Lady Brienne—“ and Jaime’s on the verge of interjecting a corrective “Ser,” but Podrick beats him to it. Pod’s still angry with him, which is fair, but he’s softening a little—clearly relieved that someone is taking over the position he’s repeatedly been refused, if still wary about trusting Brienne’s welfare to Jaime. That’s understandable, even if it rankles. He’d stolen a moment yesterday to offer his quiet congratulations for the impending betrothal, and Pod’s boyish face had lit up like a candle—poor besotted fool, but it’s nice to see someone look happy. And Brienne and Althwyn have finally achieved a ceasefire, now—they’ll wean her off the remaining dose of poppy milk over a sennight, not two, but the splint on her leg stays until the day before they’re to set sail—so the maester finally hustles himself out, robes swirling, huffing with an air of insulted authority.

Brienne turns her blue gaze on him, and drops her eyes to his right arm. “That does look more useful,” she observes, even-voiced. He’d mentioned his arrangements for the hook several days ago. It’s something they’d discussed back in Winterfell, cloistered in her room in the days after the battle, during that brief window of time when their conversations had been unburdened by either distance or formality. She’d pointed out that a sharp hook might have allowed him to dispatch a few more wights than he had, and he’d said, “yes, but think about what I’d still be cleaning out of the damned cuff,” and she’d laughed at him, her face warm and open. It won’t do to dwell on it, now, with her closed-off and wary before him, so he just says, “I haven’t had a chance to test it fully yet, but the fellow did good work.”

“And the ship?”

“I spoke with the captain Ser Davos suggested this morning. It’s not a fast vessel, but it looks sturdy enough, and the hold is sufficiently large to take on all the cargo you’ve requested at Storm’s End.” Gendry Baratheon has promised her that he will resupply Tarth for the losses it suffered during the pirate raids, at least to the extent the Stormlands can afford, and they’ll be picking up the first load of grain and goods on their way.

“Good,” she says. “Tell the captain—what was his name, again?—to come see me tomorrow, if he can, and I’ll speak with him then.”

“It’s Captain Corivan, and I’ll send a message up the hill to let you know when to expect him.”

“Thank you, Ser Jaime. Pod, fetch me a scroll from the desk so I can write to Evenfall?”

It’s a dismissal, and he doesn’t protest, just inclines his head and murmurs a polite “Ser,” and “Podrick,” as he exits the room.

Tyrion comes and finds him at the outlook over the docks, ten days later, watching as the ship’s initial cargo is loaded. His brother’s in better spirits these days, busy with his plans for the rapidly approaching kingsmoot—Jaime’s thankful they’re making their escape before he can get wrangled into attending another gathering in the Dragonpit with a bunch of people who’d cheerfully kill him if they had the opportunity—and there’s no longer a wounded fury in his eyes when he looks at Jaime. They’d mended the rift between them, as much as possible, a fortnight previously, when Tyrion had come to fetch him away from Lion Hill one day and walked him to a quiet little grove outside the city walls, where a patch of turned earth marked the ground: the grave in which he’d buried their sister a month ago, in secret, after begging her body from Snow and getting it taken down from the walls. Tyrion hadn’t said much, then, but he’d put a hand on Jaime’s shoulder when he’d knelt, and stood there next to him for a while, before walking away to give him a chance to mourn privately. It helps, more than he would have expected, to have that to carry away with him: the memory of her resting place, an image that might, in time, take the place of the ones that still haunt his dreams.

Today, Tyrion’s actually in a teasing mood, and it would be aggravating if it hadn’t been so long since that’s happened. He puts up with it, although when Tyrion says, “and I hear the new prince of Dorne has got smallclothes dropping from Sunspear to Storm’s End, it’s just _wonderful_  how some things never change,” he thinks about the last time he’d set sail from this harbor, and why, and the irritated amusement drains out of him between one breath and the next. But he’s getting accustomed to it, now, these moments when he forgets to guard his thoughts and the bottom drops out of the world in an instant, so he’s able to breathe through it, keep on walking down the steps to the dockside. Tyrion notices, though—it’s apparent from the telltale line of his shoulders, the little pause that checks his stride, and he finally ceases the scurrilous stream of ribald commentary about ships and women and women on ships that he’s kept up for the past several minutes. But instead of shutting up altogether, he halts at the wooden railing above the last flight of steps, and says, abruptly, “I hope you’ll reconsider, about Casterly Rock. It’s not as if I’ll have much time to spare for the Westerlands, when I’m busy here.”

Jaime shakes his head, keeping his eyes on the bay stretched out blue before them. “It’s yours, if you want it, and if you don’t, you can ask me again in a year or two, but the answer’s not going to change. I’m sure the steward can keep on keeping things in hand. And you might feel differently if—when you have children.”

Tyrion snorts, his merriment returning, and says, “I wouldn’t go counting chickens before any egg’s been predicted, let alone laid.” They’ve talked about, or around, a number of things lately, but one of the things they haven’t come close to discussing is the ambiguous status of Tyrion’s long-ago marriage to the Lady of Winterfell, who is at this very moment personally seeing Brienne to her cabin onboard the _Petrel_ , a farewell Jaime has no intention of interrupting. He’d expected they might make some announcement regarding a formal annulment, now that they're both back in King’s Landing, although he supposes it might then raise the question of the validity of the subsequent Bolton marriage, and that’s a mess of thorns he has no desire to contemplate. Maybe they prefer to leave the question unraised themselves. As far as he knows, they’re in daily contact, as joint members of the emergent small council if nothing more, while Sansa wears a direwolf embroidered upon her breast and calls herself Lady Stark, and Tyrion says nothing and pursues no women, discreetly or otherwise. Until bringing up Casterly Rock, Tyrion hasn’t said anything that so much as touches on his domestic intentions, as opposed to his political ones, even though he’s got a future to plan for too, they both do—and in any case, the subject of Tyrion and marriage is as fraught a matter as any in their shared history, so better not to bring it up now.

“I’ll tell the lord steward to hold steady on course, then,” says Tyrion, bringing Jaime back to himself and the place where they stand. “After all, in a year or two, you might have reasons to think differently, yourself.” Jaime does look at him then, and is almost startled by the quiet sincerity he sees on the scarred face. Tyrion smiles at him. “I’m sorry to see you go, you know, but I’m glad you’re going with her.”

“I don’t—Tyrion, there’s not _any_ kind of understanding between us, _especially_ not now—” he’s stammering, like an idiot, unable to find the right words, even for his brother, not when he can’t foresee a possible way to say them to her first, as is and should be her right. The only clear path he can see before in him is the one that’s there now, a path down to the ship waiting before them at the water’s edge, and out of this city and the ruins of the life he once lived in it.

His display of incoherence gets a momentary smirk, but then Tyrion’s face goes solemn again. “I haven’t told you—I said it to Cersei, when we met after the Dragonpit, but I never said it to you, and I should have—how very sorry I am about Tommen and Myrcella. More than I can say,” and Jaime has to put his hand to the railing, then, to steady himself. It’s too much to think of them, still, and only now is he grasping what Tyrion was trying to say, before—that not only do they have a future, somehow, but their descendants could have one too, could _exist_. It feels at once like a betrayal—because he already has children, and they are dead and ashes and will never bear his name—and an unhoped-for gift, one he’s not ready to examine closely.

“I know,” he manages, eventually. “I know you loved them too.”

Two hours out of the sheltered harbor and into Blackwater Bay they discover that Brienne has, for the first time in her life, become vulnerable to seasickness. She’s so furious about it that the long-absent color in her cheeks finally comes back in full, a crimson banner. It would be foolish to let her see him rejoice at that, so he makes himself go, listening from the corridor to the sound of her—prickly as the porcupine he once saw at a Lannisfair stall as a boy—saying, “but I’ve been fine on the water since before I could _walk_ ,” to young Symon, the apprentice maester who’s anxiously trying to reassure her that it’s probably just a temporary effect of the lingering concussion, one that will almost certainly go away "as you recover, my lady."

Jaime’s been a man of arms long enough to be familiar with the assorted minor humiliations of convalescence, although he’s mindful of the fact that he’s never had to endure a recovery from injuries this extensive—even the loss of his hand hadn’t left him as helpless as she’s been, these past two months. He consoles himself with the knowledge that, if the maesters are telling the truth, her prospects are better than his, in the long run. A stump can’t regrow a missing limb, but bones can knit themselves back together, and she was strong and healthy before, half a decade younger than he’d been when he’d taken that blow. It’s too early to be certain, but she should be able to fight again, should eventually regain most, if not all, of the capacity she’s lost. But she must be scared that she won’t, he knows, and now that she’s well enough to care, she’s clearly mortified to be witnessed in these moments of weakness. So he doesn’t insist on being there to hold the basin as she pukes, or guide her to the chamber pot on trembling legs. That’s what the apprentice is for, and why Jaime—backed up by the united front of three senior maesters in King’s Landing and Sansa besides—had insisted on bringing the boy. It shouldn’t matter, even so—gods know, she’s seen him spitting up horse piss in the mud, seen him caked in his own shit and vomit, ready to lay down and die. She’d washed his stinking, semi-conscious body in a streamlet, one night on their way to Harrenhal, her hands brisk and hesitant with embarassment, but gentle. He’d seen her bare in the bath, then. And years later, out of it, too—there’s not a part of her body he hasn’t seen, or touched. He knows what the pattern of freckles on her chest looks like when she blushes, knows the exact texture of the fair curls at her cunt, knows the high-pitched sounds she makes, half-stifled against her hand, when she comes. He shouldn’t think of that, now; it’s lost to him, gone with the past, and he curses the walls his choices have built back up between them, if only because they hold him back from going to her aid now. But her dignity is precious to him, so he waits quietly in his cabin for half a day longer, until it’s been more than an hour since he’s heard the sound of retching through the thin wall that separates them.

When he comes back to her cabin, she’s sleeping lightly, alone, so he settles himself on the low stool by her berth and watches the patterns of wave-reflected light from the little round window play on the wall. It’s mindless and peaceful and somehow absorbing enough that it takes him a few moments to notice when Brienne finally wakes. She blanches at the offer of food, but lets him bring her a tin cup of water, sipping from it quietly while she obviously wages some kind of internal battle between her polite manners and the exhausted irritation still bubbling under their surface. Jaime just waits—he has the mother-wit, somehow, to know this isn’t a mood he can coax or badger her out of—until she finally comes to a truce with herself, and turns to him and says, “Read to me. Something that will be a distraction.” So he goes and finds the books she’s had packed into her luggage—a mixture of military treatises and old poetry and the chronicles of travelers who’d explored Essos and beyond in generations past. He picks out Toleuryn’s _Account of a Voyage Across the Shivering Sea_ —Tyrion’s mentioned that one, he’s pretty sure—and returns to her bedside, where he opens the volume and starts to read to her. He’s never been a very good reader, but his father had hammered at least a basic ability into him, and he manages to pick his way through the shifting pattern of the letters without too much trouble, even if he stumbles over the strange placenames and foreign words.

So this becomes the pattern of their days, gradually, in the first leg of the voyage: he joins her in her cabin in the afternoons or evenings, careful not to impose himself for too many hours at once, or, when the weather’s good, finds her up on the deck, where she sits in a wooden chair, wrapped up in warm furs. They don’t talk about their shared past, or about the future beyond the practicalities of the journey, but he reads to her, or tells carefully-edited stories from his youth—no mention of his family or his time at court, just memories of his days as a squire, and accounts of the travels he’s made that had nothing to do with any of the wars. Sometimes she replies with fragments of information about Tarth: descriptions of the landscape, or brief anecdotes about her father and his household at Evenfall, though almost nothing of her own experiences there. In the years they’ve known one another, he’s been able to assemble a pattern out of the evidence of her flinches, her reflexive wariness and her carefully guarded defenses, enough to see in them a map of her difficult youth. But he doesn’t probe, now, even when the opportunity presents itself. She shows no appetite for personal conversation of the sort they’d shared in Winterfell, back when they had begun to trust each other with pieces of themselves, and he’s careful to heed the limits of the unspoken treaty-lines between them, even as the icy formality of her manner of address (he’s still always “Ser,” except when she’s tired enough to forget herself) starts to melt away.

When they hit the mouth of Blackwater Bay and turn into the Narrow Sea the winds pick up and the waves with them, but mercifully, Brienne’s appetite has returned, and she’s untroubled by all but the worst of the rough weather. One evening, Jaime’s sitting there reading excerpts from Toleuryn, again, when the ship’s rocking unbalances him. His left hand and his attention are occupied by the pages, and he reaches, unthinking, to brace himself against the wall with his right—and the hook skitters across the wood, scraping it but gaining no purchase, while he goes down off the stool with a thump. “It’s nothing,” he insists, scrambling up from the floor and waving off her concern as he rights the stool and attempts to reseat himself. Brienne watches him, her alarm fading into something like amusement, the first glimmer of it she’s shown towards him since their time in the North. She pauses for a moment, then shifts herself further towards the wall. “Here,” she says, indicating the wooden edge of the bunk, no longer too close to her side. “I don’t want you collecting more bruises on my account.”

“Except the ones you put there yourself,” he agrees, before his good sense catches up with his mouth, but she lets him get away with it this time, and he bites his tongue and settles back down, a little ungainly, and puts the book on his knee and picks up where he left off. The berth is definitely steadier, since it's built into the frame of the ship, even if he’s distracted by the lingering warmth on the abandoned pillow at his back. It’s easy to relax into it, to lose track of himself and the details of Toleuryn’s opinions regarding the tree cults of Ifequevron, as Brienne grows drowsy beside him. He’s suddenly aware of her long limbs settling deeper into the feather-stuffed pallet, a hand’s breadth from his arm, close enough to feel the heat radiating off her body. He’s holding his breath, now, conscious of every tiny motion he makes. He doesn’t know what to do. He should get up and go, he tells himself, because he doubts this is something he’s allowed to have, ever again. But he can’t make himself do it, so instead he just closes the book, and then his eyes. Some tension that’s been strung in his bones since the day he left Winterfell gradually unspools itself, and he sinks into the softness around him and drifts off to sleep.


	5. And the Fighting is Strong (Brienne)

She wakes up slowly to the gentle rocking of the boat, the ache in her bones a little less deep than it was the day before: each morning it’s a tiny bit better. It’s a relief to be free of the splints and bandages, to be able to turn without feeling them dig into her flesh, to flex her fingers and gauge the extent of their lingering stiffness. It’s a relief to lie here, drowsy and warm, breathing in the familiar, comforting smell of— _oh_. Brienne is fully awake in an instant at the realization that she’s not alone: Jaime’s next to her, his breathing deep and even, sound asleep. She resists a momentary impulse to shove him off onto the floor and listen to him yelp. _How did he_ —she turns her head, and catches sight of the closed book on his lap, the hook at the end of his right arm resting atop it, and it comes back to her: he’d been reading, and she’d let the steady murmur of his voice lull her to sleep. He must have drifted off as well—he’s still sitting halfway up, slumped against the pillow, his head nodding at an angle that’s bound to give him a sore neck. So it was an accident, she thinks, and then doesn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed by that.

She’s been at war with herself, quietly, these past few days, reckoning with the creeping familiarity that's reestablishing itself between them. Jaime’s presence on this voyage is both a balm and an irritant—it draws her out of her frustrated, despairing impatience with the limitations of her healing body, while echoing at every turn memories she’s been trying to leave behind. He’s been nothing but kind and patient, uncharacteristically so, since the day they’d set sail—and before that, too, though he’d kept a more careful distance in King’s Landing. She knows he’s trying to apologize, it’s obvious in every cautious gesture of care he shows her, but she’s not sure of the motives beneath his actions: guilt, sorrow, affection, desire, something deeper? She wants to shake him until his teeth rattle, force him to confess the answer, but she’s still afraid of discovering what it might be.

The sight of him asleep at her side, unguarded, brings everything rushing back. The nights they’d spent together in Winterfell had been a joy to them both, and for her, a revelation, but there had been moments when she’d wondered what ghosts he was trying to drive away through the frantic intensity he’d often brought to her bed. He’d rarely spoken of Cersei, or their children, although she'd known they must have been weighing on his mind, even in her arms. She hadn’t been brave enough to force the subject, then, and she knows now that her silence had been a foolish, hopeful mistake. She’d wished him comfort, and peace, and done her best to give them to him, as he’d—unexpectedly, astonishingly—gifted them to her, night after night. But all along, in some corner of her heart, she’d been waiting for the axe to come down. And when it had finally fallen, it had been worse than she could have possibly foreseen, despite every wary instinct that told her to be ready.

She’s feeling too much now, spending hours in his company every day, aware of his presence on the other side of the wall even when she's alone. The effect is cumulative, too intense to ignore, and there’s no solution for it, because she can’t do the one thing she’s always done with her ungovernable feelings, ever since she was an awkward, sensitive, over-tall girl surrounded by nasty little shits who wanted to see her cry: put them into her body, use them as fuel, energy driving her to swim and ride and fight. She wants to hack at a dummy with a wooden sword, or drill and re-drill her footwork and blocks and swings until she’s swaying with welcome exhaustion, feeling nothing but the satisfying burn of well-worked muscles. It’s terrifying to have that escape blocked to her, to find every possible route out of herself locked and barred. She can cope with the pain, with the indignity of being weak and clumsy, with the polite invasiveness of Symon’s diligent attentions—at least she can piss without help now, thank gods—but the forced inactivity is maddening. It leaves her unbalanced, susceptible to things, out of control.

She sits up, abruptly, knowing it will wake Jaime, intending it to. He jolts awake with a startled expression, his hand coming up to rub the sleep from his eyes, and then sees her and goes still. “My apologies,” he says, after a pause.

“Next time, choose a livelier book,” she tells him.

He makes a face. “And leave off the hook,” he adds, his words still a little sleep-fogged, waving his right arm. “I might have cut you.”

“It’s fine.” She doesn’t say anything more, doesn’t look him in the eye, and so he gets up and goes, with a polite nod on his way out the door. She lies back against the pillow, closes her eyes, breathes in the lingering scent of him, and wonders what in the seven hells to do now. But Jaime doesn’t make it awkward, at least not more than she already has. He comes back that evening, after supper, with the usual quiet knock on the door, carrying a different book in hand—a collection of comic Myrish tales, nothing soporific there—and makes no mention of the reason. He reads to her for a time, taking care to finish a passage and bid her goodnight while she’s still fully awake. He smiles at her when he goes, his eyes friendly, if a little sad, and once she’s alone again, she tries not to let herself wonder what it means.

They’re a day or so past Massey’s Hook—the mainland coastline beginning take on a familiar and welcoming shape—when all hell breaks loose. It starts slowly, with a disagreement about whether or not Jaime will accompany Brienne and Corivan ashore in Storm’s End to meet with the Baratheon bannermen, or stay on the _Petrel_ to help stow the cargo coming aboard, and then it kindles into a firestorm, so quickly she doesn’t see the flames licking at their feet until they’re raging all around.

“These men don’t know me, except as some freak Renly named to his Kingsguard, and who was rumored to have murdered him, to boot. None of them fought in the North. Do you think they’ll take me seriously when I come alone, with no company but a sea-captain?” She’s sitting on the berth, glaring at him.

Jaime shrugs, trying to appear diffident, and failing. “You’ve always had a particular talent for showing up fools who underestimate you.”

“Not without a sword in my hand! They’ll see a bloody _invalid_ , a woman, with no reason to command their respect. And their new lord won’t be there to tell them otherwise, because your damned brother has called him away to the Dragonpit.”

“More like, a cockstand for Arya Stark has called him away to the Dragonpit. Brave fellow, I’ll grant, to pursue that girl. Most men would run, not get out their—"

“Shut up,” she snaps at him. “Lewd gossip isn't going to distract me from this. I need you there, Ser.”

“No, you don’t,” he argues, exasperated. “These men may not know you, but they surely hate me, and with good reason. If you think the prospect of me turning up and playing the lord will make them more likely to rate you highly, you’re wrong.” There’s a sharp note of disgust to the way he says _playing the lord_ , like he’s talking about a garment he doesn’t want to feel touching his skin.

“They know you as a force to be reckoned with. I don’t care whether they like you; they’ll respect you, more than they will me. At least not until I have time to prove why they should, and I _don’t have time_ now.” She can't understand why he won't be persuaded on this point; it's the first thing he's really refused her since turning up at the door of her sickroom more than a month ago. 

“You always insist on believing that people will see something good when they look at me,” he tells her, wearily. “Stop making that mistake.” And then there’s something else there in the cabin, palpable between them: they’re not really talking about the bannermen at Storm’s End any longer, they’re back in the freezing courtyard in Winterfell that she never quite managed to leave.

Brienne is angry now, and wants to cut him back, until he bears a scar matched to every one of her own. She hates it, this impulse to wound, to take her own pain and self-doubt and form them into a weapon to lacerate someone else with. She’ll always regret how harsh she’d been to Pod during his first months with her, the way she’d lashed out at him in the turmoil of her grief for Renly, for Lady Catelyn, her despair at her failure to save them and her fear that she’d never redeem her oaths. Pod’s never held it against her, won’t hear even a word of apology, but she hadn’t forgiven herself, at least not until the sight of the joy and pride on his face when she knighted him the day before leaving King’s Landing had sealed the lingering wound. She doesn’t want to behave like that again now, not even to Jaime, no matter how angry she is with him—especially when she knows he’s still confused and grieving, easier to hurt than Pod ever was, for all that he keeps his weak places hidden away, armored with layer after layer of practiced insouciance and high-handed scorn.

“You wanted to come,” she reminds him, keeping her voice low and firm. “You begged to come, to see me home safely. That’s what you said.”

“Storm’s End isn’t your home, and it won’t be safer for you there if I show my face,” Jaime grinds out.

“Then _why are you here_?” The words come out furious, grating against her teeth.

“I love you,” he says, helplessly, and it’s what she’s wanted, for so long, to hear those words—ones he’s never said outright to her, not even in Winterfell, when he’d been saying it with his eyes, with his body, so obviously that even that a naive maid could perceive the truth of it. This isn’t how she wanted to hear them. It makes everything worse.

“If you mean that, then why didn’t you tell me the truth? Why didn’t you tell me about the child,”—and she’s admitting something, letting him know that she knows, seeing the impact of that hit him—“why didn’t you just come to me and say it, say _I’m sorry, but I love her too, I need to go back, I have to try_. I would have _listened_. I would have _let you go_.”

“I was trying to protect you!” He's shouting now, a cornered animal baring its teeth, and she can’t stop herself from shouting back.

“I never needed you to protect me! I’m a _knight_ , Jaime. You made me one. Or was that a ruse, too, just a sop to make a foolish woman smile before the battle, or ease your path into my bed?”

He’s staring at her, now, his face white with horror.

“That’s what you made me wonder,” she says, her voice falling to a whisper, cracking apart. “You made me doubt _that_ ,” and the look in his eyes is like she’s picked up Oathkeeper and driven it through his chest.

There are tears on her face, and she doesn’t remember when they started, but she can’t stop them now. Words pour out of her like vomit, endless and sickening. “Nothing could have hurt me more. Not any trick some cruel boy ever played on me. Not even Renly’s death, or Lady Catelyn’s. If you’d fallen in the battle, I could have borne that. But you made me stand there and listen to you try to tarnish everything you ever gave me, watch you ride away to die, without ever telling me the truth, without trusting me to bear it.” The sentences break in her mouth, caught amid sobs she can no longer hold back. They’re tearing through her, worse even than in the courtyard at Winterfell, where at least she’d kept her feet. She’s doubling over, arms wrapped around her torso, her body heaving, shaking and humiliated. No one’s ever seen her like this, she’s never let anyone close enough to get a chance. The torrent sweeps her away, leaving her almost unaware of his presence—but then Jaime touches her, a hand on her shoulder, and when she doesn’t jerk away or hit him, his arms come around her as he falls to the bed beside her, pulling her close. He’s holding her, stroking her back, saying things she can barely hear over her own wrenching sobs and the rush of noise in her head: “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he tells her, saying her name like it shatters on his tongue. He’s crying, too: she can feel the shudder of it going through his body, hear his voice breaking. He rocks her, folded over against him, her head on his chest, and she surrenders to it, going limp, letting him brace her, while he just keeps on saying it, over and over again: _I’m sorry, I love you, forgive me._

When she finally washes up on the far shore of it, wrung out and battered, her head is cradled in his lap, his hand stroking through her hair. She can hear the wet hitch of his breathing, although he’s bringing it back under control, now. She pushes herself up, and he doesn’t try to keep her, just helps steady her there, his arm at her back, and then releases her, waiting. She’s exhausted; she feels emptied out and painfully exposed. Jaime stands, then, scrubbing his face on his sleeve, and goes to the chest at the foot of her bunk, picking up a cloth and dipping it in the ewer on the table before offering it to her, silently. She takes it, wiping away the tears and snot and spit, but she can’t meet his eyes. He turns towards the door, as if to leave, and she says, “Stay,” her voice small and unfamiliar in her ears. He halts where he’s standing, and then turns and comes back to her bedside, slow and unsure. After a moment, he reaches out, tentative, to brush his hand along her cheek, and Brienne closes her eyes, lets her aching head nod into his palm, before she reaches for him, pulling him down to the bed with her. She keeps on pulling him until they’re lying there side by side, and he puts his arms around her again, lets her tuck her face into his shoulder, and stays, holding her as she falls asleep.

So she finds herself waking beside him, again, in the early light of the morning, and watches his face, studying its new lines and scars, the sharp relief of his nose and cheekbone and jaw, still too prominent despite a fortnight of decent meals. He needs a haircut, she thinks, and fresh vegetables, better sleep, more sunlight. He needs someone to take care of him, the way he's been taking care of her. He comes awake slowly, while she watches him, and she can pinpoint the moment he realizes where he is and remembers what’s happened, the shadow of it crossing his face like a cloud. Brienne reaches for him, then, and takes his face in her hands, like she'd done the night she’d lost him the first time. She doesn’t want to lose him again.

Jaime closes his eyes, breathes in and out. “If you want me to leave, when we reach Storm’s End, I will.”

“No,” she tells him. “That’s not what I want.”

“I don’t want to keep hurting you,” he says, sounding ragged and more than a little bit desperate. “I don’t know how to fix this. I keep making it worse, and I can’t mend it.”

“You might let me help, for once,” she tells him, stroking a thumb along the place where his beard meets his cheek. “You could use another hand.”

That forces a barren chuckle out of him, like she’d hoped it would. She needs to understand the terrain of him better, if this is going to work, to know which sore points she can press on, probe with her fingers, even poke fun at—like he and his brother do, when they’re together—and which ones to leave alone.

Jaime sighs, and rolls on his back, catching her hand and moving it to his lips. He kisses her palm, then lowers it, and says, “It’s not what I deserve.”

“You don’t get to choose,” she reminds him. “You can choose to stay or to go, but it’s not for you to decide what you, or I, don’t deserve. That’s the mistake you made in Winterfell.”

“Hardly the only one,” he sighs.

She holds herself still, hand resting on his collarbone. “Coming to my chamber, that night, was that a mistake?”

Jaime blows out his breath. “It was selfish. It was wrong, when I couldn’t give you—give all of myself, freely.” She sees it more clearly, now: she’d known then that he wasn’t wholly hers to claim, but she hadn’t realized it might have distressed him, too, to be offering her a divided self. She had assumed the turmoil she glimpsed in him was simply the ongoing struggle with his feelings for Cersei, had never guessed it might also be about what he felt he owed to her, a debt he didn’t think he could pay.

“Do you regret it?”

He’s silent, for a moment. “I should.”

“I don’t. I think even if—even if you’d died, in King’s Landing, I wouldn’t have, not in the end. Maybe for a time, while I was grieving. But if it hadn’t happened, if I’d lost you without ever having you, I’d have always wondered. I wouldn’t have known what to grieve.”

He turns his head, gazing at her across the pillow. “I was careless with you, with your trust, and I’m sorry for it. But believe me, there was no falsehood, no dishonor, when I knighted you. I swear it. It might be the truest thing I ever did. Doubt anything else, but not that.”

She swallows past the lump in her throat. She knows, she would know even if he weren’t saying it now. The look on his face when she’d thrown it at him last night had told her clearly enough. Jaime's lied to her before, but he’s not lying about this.

“I believe you,” she tells him, quietly, and he nods.

“Shall we call a truce, then?” he asks, and she hears the unspoken echo, in her own voice: _you need trust to have a truce._

“I want to,” she says. “I’m trying.”

“I trust you,” he whispers.

She looks at him, fierce. “Enough to stop hiding things from me for my  _protection_?” The last word is acid on her tongue.

He bites his lip. “I’m trying. But you have to trust me, too—stop walling me out, calling me Ser like I'm a stranger, hiding it when you’re hurt. I can’t—I can’t tell where I’ve gone wrong if I don’t know what you’re feeling. I can’t mend what you won’t let me see.”

It frightens her, the idea of taking that risk, even for him. Especially with him. “I wish I still had your armor,” she tells him.

He laughs, this time for real, and strokes her shoulder. “Shall I give you another set, then? I didn’t realize you’d lost the last one. That was careless of you, Ser.”

“I was wearing it when I brought Arya out of the city. They told me it was beyond repair, afterwards.”

That sobers him. “If it kept you alive then, I should send a purse of gold to the armorer, if he’s still living, may the Smith bless his hammer. If you won’t let me protect you, my lady, will you at least let me equip you to defend yourself?”

Brienne smiles, grateful for his understanding. “That’s what I want,” she tells him. She doesn’t need him to fight her battles for her, only to be there, shoring her up her defenses, ready to fight in tandem if she calls him to her side, and to comfort her after.

Jaime is quiet, watching her face. “I’m not a whole man,” he warns her. “Or a good one, despite what you think.”

“Do you still wish you’d died in King’s Landing?”

“No. Not every day. Sometimes. I wish I'd been there when…I didn’t want her to die alone,” he says, and she can hear how much it still hurts him, to have not been able to give Cersei that one last gift.

“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be free of it,” he tells her. “Enough to be…what anyone should be, in order to stand at your side.”

Brienne knows it’s going to take a long time to convince him, to make him understand what she's already certain of. But it’s not the first time she’s needed to have enough faith for them both, while he stumbles around finding his way to it. She can be patient, if she doesn't have to wait alone.

“Will you stay, even so?” she asks, trying to keep her voice steady.

“Yes,” he tells her, and she breathes out, stows the answer away in her heart, for safekeeping.

She takes his hand, folding it in her own, brings it to her chest, where he can feel the heartbeat under cloth and skin. “Then that’s good enough.”


	6. Breaking Down the Distance (Jaime)

“My brother told you that!”

“No, he didn’t,” Brienne says. “Do you think I couldn’t see it for myself?”

“Someone else, then,” he insists.

She shakes her head, the corner of her mouth curling up. “I surmised it. Now drink.”

And Jaime does, irreversibly revealing himself as a man who’s charged a dragon, fought a horde of the dead, and is still secretly afraid of spiders (and snakes, but he’s not going to admit that one, unless she makes him confess it too).

They’re sitting cross-legged on her bunk, facing one another—Brienne at the head, so she can lean back on the pillows; he’d insisted—each with a clay cup of small beer in hand. They’re playing Tyrion’s stupid game, though not with wine this time—Symon says she’s not supposed to have wine, yet, on account of the blow to her head, and she’d scoffed and said she didn’t want it in any case. But the game was her suggestion, and while Jaime may be the stupidest Lannister, he’s not too stupid to realize that this is, on some level, a stroke of well-deserved revenge—for his complicity in Tyrion’s attempts to unsettle her, that night, if not for the greater sins that followed. He hadn’t protested, though, when she asked him to play it again, because she’s right: they’ve got to figure out how to tell each other things, to find some way across the treacherous landscape of their history, and it’s better to do it like this, like it’s a foolish drinking game of no particular consequence, than to keep stumbling around blindly and smashing into the rocks.

It’s his turn. “You wish I still had my sword hand so you can finally prove that you’d beat me in a fair fight, on my best day, unchained.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “That’s hardly the only reason,” she says, and when he can’t help but grin at her, she realizes what she’s accidentally implied and blushes bright red. “That’s _not_ what I meant. And I _would_ have beaten you.”

“If only we knew. Drink,” he tells her, and she does.

Brienne looks at him, considering her next move. “You say you hate the North, but you were proud when the men at Winterfell looked at you with respect, after the battle.”

Jaime drains his cup, and instead of refilling it right away, captures one of her bare feet with his hand—he’s taken to leaving the hook off when he’s in her cabin—and pulls it to his lap. She raises an eyebrow, but she lets him rub it, comfort them both with a moment of contact. He’s slept in her bed for two nights running, ever since the awful evening when she’d broken down, and at the end of the storm, asked him to stay. They spend the nights curled together, but he hasn’t kissed her yet, not on the mouth—only her palm, her forehead, her tangled hair, where it's grown long enough to curl at her ear. He knows the truce between them is still fragile, and doesn’t want to jeopardize it by moving too fast. So they find other ways to touch, when they’re awake: he kisses her hand, all courtly politesse; she rests her head on his shoulder when she’s tired; he rubs her back, or her feet, cursing the absence of his right hand all the while.

Brienne reaches for the cup and refills it for him, passing it back, and he reluctantly lets go of her foot. “Your turn,” she reminds him.

“You love Sansa, but she frightens you sometimes.” She tilts her head to the side, taking a moment to think about it, but eventually she lifts the cup and sips, her eyes daring him to comment: _and so?_

“I don’t mean any disrespect,” he says. “The opposite, actually. She’s a formidable woman. She’s made herself a queen, in fact if not in name, and it’s wise to be a little frightened of monarchs.”

“She’s suffered terrible things,” Brienne tells him, tactfully refraining from pointing out that most of them were directly or indirectly the fault of his family. “Surviving what she’s been through would make anyone somewhat ruthless, at least towards their enemies.” He suspects that she’s not just talking about Sansa, and nods.

“The reason you never told anyone else the truth about Aerys is that you’re ashamed you didn’t stop him sooner,” she says.

Jaime pauses. “Hmm. I don’t think that’s true, actually. Mostly it was just a matter of being an arrogant bastard, too proud to explain myself to anyone who dared to suggest I might possibly care about their scorn.”

“You did care, though,” she tells him.

“Half-a-point. I’ll give you that, if not the one about Aerys, fuck him anyway,” he says, and drinks.

They’re more evenly matched at this than perhaps she’d expected, when she’d made the suggestion: Brienne is perceptive, a better judge of character than he’ll ever be, but she’s also more innocent, even now, still incapable of imagining the worst. Of course, she’d probably say he’s incapable of seeing the potential for anything, no matter how condemnable, to be better than it appears at first glance: after all, that’s how she sees him. He is still astonished by her mercy, her forbearance, the fact that’s she sitting here with him at all, when any sensible woman would have shoved him overboard long before this point. At night he keeps replaying her words in his mind— _you made me doubt that_ , and _nothing hurt me more_ —and wondering if he can ever repay this debt. He doesn’t know how; he never expected to be forgiven. He can’t stop stealing little looks at her: her lovely long fingers, the arch of her brows, her untidy hair. She doesn’t bother to slick it back sternly like she used to, these days, so it’s settled into a gentle wave at her forehead; it reminds him of the way she'd looked in Harrenhal, wearing that absurd pink dress, after the bath.

And it’s his turn again and he’s a fool, so: “You liked looking at me, in the bath at Harrenhal. You thought about it afterwards."

Brienne gives him an exasperated look— _really, this?_ —but she drinks, managing not to blush.

“I knew it!” he crows, delighted.

“You looked terrible,” she tells him, “you were filthy and halfway to dead. But yes, I liked it. Besides, you were looking too. You thought about it when you had the armor made for me,” and she’s correct, again, so he raises his cup to salute her, and drinks.

Her admission makes him recall the morning they’d woken up together, naked and hungover, for the first time. He’d noticed her looking at his stump while he groped around on the floor for his gold hand, with the intention of putting it on and going to fetch them breakfast, and he’d said, “I know it’s unsightly,” and Brienne had shaken her head _no_ , told him, “That’s—not what I’m thinking. When I look at it, I think about what you did for me, and what it cost you.” And then, after a pause, “And there’s _nothing_ unsightly about you.” She’d blushed, then, furiously, and he hadn’t been able to resist teasing her, needling her to elaborate further on that point, until she’d whacked him on the shoulder, indignant, and buried her flaming face in the pillow so that her words came out muffled: “You are the most beautiful man I have ever seen. I _like_ looking at you.” At which point, jubilant, he’d abandoned any thought of breakfast whatsoever and spent quite some time rewarding her for her honesty. He still burns with the memory of what it felt like to have her, and it’s worse now that they’re tiptoeing towards the point where that seems like something that could happen again. But he’s shy of it, too, unable to recapture the bold arrogance that led him, pot-valiant and jealous and afire with lust, to her door. He’s revealed so much more of himself, now, admitted things he’s ashamed of, and that feels much more dangerous than barging into her room with a jug of wine and undoing his shirtlaces with his teeth like a bloody fool ever had.

“Your turn,” he reminds her.

“You wish your children had known you were their father.” And Jaime’s back on another boat, suddenly, back in one of the worst moments of a life that’s been notable for having had many of them, not that he hasn’t mostly deserved it.

“I’m sorry,” she says, like she didn’t mean to unbalance him that hard, so he tells her, “Myrcella did. I told her, and she said that she already knew, that she was glad. Right before she—” he cuts off, tips his head back and looks at the ceiling, so the water won’t spill from his eyes.

“Oh, Jaime,” she says, her voice full of sorrow. He just shakes his head. What is there to say? He wishes Brienne could have met her, seen her lovely face, just once, but she was already long gone to Dorne when they’d made it back to King’s Landing.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” she says. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

He sighs. “No, I don’t mind. It’s just that it seems…unchivalrous, to sit here in your bed and talk about my sister and the three, or four, bastards I sired on her.”

“But you loved them. I'd never ask you to deny that,” she tells him. “They’re a part of you. You don’t have to share any of it with me, if you don’t want to, but I wouldn’t wish you to pretend otherwise.” She’s looking at her knees. “I was too much of a coward to ask you about them, in Winterfell. I wish I had.”

So he tells her about the children, a little—about Tommen, who was gentle and shy, and Myrcella, unfailingly sweet, the cleverest of them all—she took after her mother in that respect, he thinks, even as he remembers Cersei saying _she was nothing like me._ She’d had the best of them both in her, and a goodness that was entirely her own. He says less about Joffrey, whom he’d loved, too, at least as a small boy, but couldn’t truly mourn, knowing what that boy had become. Sansa must have told her something of it, and she’d seen the way he’d behaved to Tyrion at the wedding. When he says as much, she nods, pensive. “He was…cruel,” she says slowly.

“Not just to her,” Jaime sighs. “He would have been a very bad king.” He looks at the floor, unable to deal with the quiet compassion on her face. “I wonder whether the last child, if there was one, would have been like him, or the others.” _The gods flip a coin._

“If?” she asks, puzzled.

“I’m not sure if it ever existed, or if she was still carrying it, by the time I got there,” he says. “When I saw her in the Red Keep, it was hard to tell.” Her gown had been loose at the middle, her shape unclear, and he’d tried, later, to recall how long it had taken for her to show with the others. Cersei had always kept a distance during her pregnancies, maintaining that it was risky to be seen too much in his company, lest people suspect, although he’d suspected it was also because she’d feared he would be repulsed by the changes in her body—an absurd thought; she’d never been more beautiful. “She believed it was real,” he says, remembering what she’d said when he found her, as her armies were being destroyed outside the walls: _She’ll kill us, Jaime, that bitch and her dragon will kill us, make it stop, please, I don’t want to die, I want our baby to live._ She’d still been angry with him, for leaving, but she’d been too frightened by then to show him much fury. _We have to surrender,_ he’d told her, _surrender and flee, it’s the only way,_ knowing as he said it that it was already too late, that they were almost certainly doomed, but that the rest of the city didn’t have to be. She’d refused to give the order, too scared or too proud to see reason, so he’d left her there and gone to ring the bells himself. He’s wondered, since, if the child had been just another figment of her madness; he still isn’t sure whether he wants to know, one way or another. He can’t keep thinking about this, so he drags his attention back to Brienne, to the game.

“Part of you wonders whether your father would be prouder, if you’d married some lout fifteen years ago and given him a litter of brats,” he says.

Brienne looks a little startled. “I don’t think so,” she says. “I wonder if that would have…made it easier for him, been better for Tarth. But he never wanted me to be unhappy. He was always proud of me, even if I wasn't what he expected.”

“An unusual man,” Jaime observes, and she smiles, some fond memory lighting her up from the inside.

“I’m glad you’ll be able to meet him,” she says, and he quails a little; he’s been suppressing a certain dread at the prospect since the day he’d asked to be allowed to accompany her home.

“I doubt he’ll feel the same way,” he says, brooding at the thought. “A disgraced and notorious Kingslayer, with one hand and no prospects, escorting his only beloved daughter?”

“He values my good opinion,” Brienne tells him, refusing to humor his temper. Then her smile wavers. “Your father was cruel to you, wasn’t he.”

Jaime vents an unpleasant little laugh, raises his cup to her, drinks.

“I wasn’t—I didn’t mean that for the game,” she says, softly.

He sighs. “He was far worse to Tyrion. To Cersei as well, in a different way. But I don’t think he’d have ever seen it as cruelty, the way he raised us. Ruled us. He thought it was love, I suppose, after a fashion.”

Brienne frowns at him. “Then he was wrong. It’s not…real love, to try and force someone into a mold you’ve cast for them, even if it’s hurting them, and say it’s for their own good. It’s not an honorable kind of love.”

“What would I know about how to love with honor?” he asks, bitterly. He’d forsworn honor to have love; what honor could there have been in making his sister an adulterer, his children bastards, the king he’d sworn to defend a cuckold? Although Robert had deserved it, the drunken ass, so fuck him too. There’d been no place for honor there, so he’d chosen loyalty instead, and had poured all his love into that bargain, until there was little left but loyalty, and then he’d forsaken that, too, in the end. Brienne is still studying his face, and he doesn’t want to drag her down into this muck, so he flips another coin, reaches for the sky instead.

“You love me,” he says, watching her closely.

Brienne flushes, a little. “You don’t need the game to know that.” Her cup’s already empty, he realizes.

“You’ve never said it,” he reminds her, and hopes his voice isn’t betraying him too badly. He wants to hear it from her lips, wants her to admit it with the same stunning honesty that she wields on any front that has nothing to do with her feelings.

“I love you,” she says, quietly, her eyes darting to the bedcover, to their hands, before returning to his.

The rush of it sweeps through him, makes him reckless. “When I saw you again, at Riverrun, you loved me. You have for years,” he tells her, handing her his cup. “Drink.”

She does, and he can’t stop himself. “When did it start? Did you know?”

He sees her hesitate. “Your sister told me,” she says, and he feels an unsteadiness that has nothing to do with the motion of the waves. “At the wedding, she asked about how I’d come to serve you, and I told her I didn’t serve you, and she said, ‘But you love him.’ I only realized it then.” She darts another look at him, like she’s not sure if she wants to open this box, find out what’s inside.

Jaime remembers it, now, seeing Cersei capture her alongside the dais, feeling hot and queasy under his armor and his heavy white cloak. “She was always…perceptive, when it came to people I cared about. She was jealous of any bond I had with anyone who wasn’t her. I liked that, for a long time,” he admits. “It made me feel that I mattered to her as much as she did to me.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry she taunted you.” He hadn’t known what had passed between them, at the time, but he’d known from what little he’d seen that he had best find a way to get Brienne out of King’s Landing. It had been just as well that Sansa had fled, and given him an excuse to protect her safety as well as the honor of her oath.

“Don’t worry about it,” Brienne says, a strange little smile curving her mouth. “She was telling the truth, after all.”

He laughs, then, and she takes his hand and pulls him towards her—this improbable astonishing giant of a woman, who’d dragged him halfway across Westeros, or so it had seemed, on the end of a rope, who’s never let go. He goes where she bids him, ends up sitting beside her, back to the pillows, and she drops her head to his shoulder, her arm going round his back. He’s done nothing to earn this, he knows, but if the gods have granted him the ability to make her smile, he may as well see that he puts it to good use. Brienne makes a contented little humming sound, her breath warm on his neck, and he doesn’t care if it’s too soon, he can’t help it, so he reaches for her chin and tilts her face up and kisses her. Not like the first time, brimming with disastrous intensity, but gently, like he’d kiss a girl he was courting, if he’d ever bothered to do such a thing. She kisses him back, mirroring his restraint, but he can sense the feeling underneath it, the promise of more. _Soon,_ he thinks to himself, and releases her, drinking in the warm blue of her eyes.

“I love you,” he says, savoring the way she smiles at him, the utter absence of guile or artifice in it, the simple truth of her. “I have for years.”


	7. Where the Four Winds Blow (Brienne)

It’s a clear, gorgeous afternoon when they come into the harbor below Storm’s End, high puffs of white cloud decorating the sky above the shore and the rising green hills, but not in numbers great enough to block out the warm sunlight. She can smell the land from a long way offshore, the rich rain-scented loam mixing with the sharp salt tang of the sea air. Shipbreaker Bay isn’t living up to its name, today; the wind is steady but not driving, and the sea almost glassy below them where the _Petrel_ ’s bow cuts through the low swells.

Despite her nerves, Brienne feels calm at the sight of it all spread out before her: she hadn’t realized how good it would feel to come back to the Stormlands after so many years away. She’d watched Tarth passing by on their left yesterday as they sailed through the straits, refusing to come belowdecks for hours, convinced she might catch sight of the sunlight winking off the windows of Evenfall if only she looked hard enough. The distance had been too great for that, but she’d seen the lighthouse at the point of Evenfall Harbor flare into brightness at dusk, before Jaime finally persuaded her come back inside, and felt an answering flame spark inside her at the sight: _home._

Now she stands on the deck, readying herself. Symon’s eyes were eloquent with disappointment at her refusal to take the walking-stick he'd offered her, but she knows it will be more hindrance than help, making her self-conscious about her uneven gait and complicating the tiresome task of projecting authority in the face of a pack of minor Baratheon vassals—some of whom she’ll undoubtedly recognize from assorted encounters, mostly unpleasant, in her youth. Jaime is beside her, dressed in a fine red leather jerkin tooled with gold, the set of his jaw betraying the tension inside him. It’s the first time she’s seen him in anything remotely gaudy since the parley in the Dragonpit, armored at Cersei's side, and she knows, because he told her, that the clothes are from Tyrion, who’d insisted on supplementing his brother’s minimal luggage with a small chest containing some better-quality garments and an unknown quantity of gold. Jaime’s wearing it because he’s offered to accompany them ashore after all, abandoning his earlier recalcitrance in the matter. She knows he’s only doing it because he’s still feeling guilty about her outburst, and wishes she didn’t have to take him up on it, given how much he clearly dislikes the prospect. But she needs him, so she’s not going to hesitate on account of feelings. He’s still wearing the hook, its dark iron an incongruous addition to the decorated cuff of his sleeve, and she’s glad the golden hand is gone. Brienne’s chosen a long blue tunic of fine cloth, embroidered with her sun-and-crescent sigil, the one she’d worn to the wedding in King’s Landing several years ago—although now it’s paired with her best leather breeches, not the split skirts she’d favored back then as an uncomfortable compromise with the standards of female dress in Joffrey’s court. Oathkeeper is a heavy and comforting presence at her hip, the first time she's worn it since she came out of the burning city with Arya.

Corivan barks orders to the crew as they draw in to the docks, his dark head bobbing and turning behind the wheel. She’s come to like and respect the captain over the course of the voyage—he’s clever and experienced, commands his ship firmly, but with evident care for the welfare of its crew. He’s sailed up and down the Narrow Sea countless times, and told her fascinating stories over supper of his visits to the great ports of western Essos, although these are the shores he knows best, he says, along with his home waters in the Bite. Once the boat is lashed securely alongside the dock, he gives the order to lower the gangway, and Brienne turns to Jaime. “Ready?”

“At your command, Ser,” he tells her, soberly, but the lines at the corners of his eyes crinkle when she smiles in response, and he takes her elbow to steady her as they step down the spray-slippery wooden ramp and onto the dock, waiting for the captain to follow them ashore. At the other end of the docks, Corivan stops for a quick word with the harbormaster, then comes back to them and says, “The grain’s already here; I’ll tell the men to start loading it now. You should go on and head up to the hall, Ser Brienne, Ser Jaime; I’ll catch up with you on the way.” So they leave him to it, and start the long climb up the shore path rising under the great curtain wall of the fortress.

Brienne walks slowly, Jaime quiet at her side, and tries to ignore the simmering ache in her left shin as they gradually rise above the masts and sails, the men scurrying on the docks shrinking to the size of ants in the distance. Memories fall into step alongside her as they approach the crest of the headland: the many occasions, now inseparable in her recollection, when she’d accompanied her father here for summits and weddings and feasts as a girl; later, the day that she’d arrived with a handful of soldiers from Tarth to answer Renly’s call to his bannermen after he declared himself king; then watching him crowned with golden antlers in front of a cheering crowd the next morning, and swearing her oath to fight with his forces and lay down her life in battle on his behalf if the gods willed it so. It seems impossibly distant to her now, more like one of those hazy childhood recollections than anything to do with the life she's come to know lately, and it’s something of a shock to realize that it’s been more than seven years since that day.

Corivan draws up behind them, huffing for breath, just before they reach the outer gate, and Brienne forces her attention back to the present as their arrival is announced and they’re waved through and greeted by a trio of men: Lord Willis Baratheon, a gray-headed hawk-faced old gentleman, cousin to Robert and current steward of Storm’s End, and Ser Jorah Swann and Donnel Penrose, two bannermen of greater and lesser middle-age. She distinctly recalls breaking Donnel’s younger brother’s nose—what was his name, Tytos?—when she was ten or eleven, how the blood spurted all over his tunic, his snide teasing replaced by angry tears, and how her father sighed at her afterwards. She wonders if he remembers it too. If so, he has the good grace not to bring it up now, thank the Seven, and they all get through the formal greetings without too much difficulty before Brienne and her guests are invited into the hall to dine.

Willis’s air of general disapproval is unceasing throughout, but at least he speaks to her with a kind of cold respect, whereas Swann looks at her sword and her breeches with outright distaste. Penrose is actually quite pleasant; maybe his brother had been an intolerable little brat at home, too. There are a few other faces she recognizes around the tables—Lady Alyse from the north end of Tarth, who’d married some Connington or other twenty-odd years ago, a wedding Brienne remembers attending as a girl; three or four men who’d been with Renly’s army at Bitterbridge, although none of them had spoken to her then; a couple of elderly retainers whose names she can't recall. She makes polite conversation as best she can, discussing the arrangements for the rest of the goods to be dispatched to the harbor after the grain is loaded on the _Petrel_ : iron, tin, and copper; bolts of linen and cotton; and hemp for making sailcloth. Willis is inclined to quibble over Gendry’s promises to Tarth, not least on the grounds that the rest of the coast has also been affected by piracy of late, if not as harshly. It’s clear that they’re all still chafing at Gendry’s elevation, especially by a queen who was deposed not long after, though none of them go so far as to dispute it outright, at least not yet.

She manages to get Lord Willis to agree, eventually, to abide by the amounts Gendry had promised in writing. He signals one of his household staff to approach the table, and Brienne reiterates the details, glad she’d thought to bring the raven scroll with her all the way from King’s Landing. Willis sends the man to ready the cartloads for the trip down to the docks, and Corivan begs leave to go with him and make sure they’re loaded onto the ship properly. “I trust that will be satisfactory, Lady Brienne,” Willis says, turning back to her.

“Thank you, my lord,” Brienne replies. It’s the fifth or sixth time he’s called her that, despite how she'd been introduced to him, and that’s the point at which Jaime finally inserts himself into the conversation.

“Ser Brienne,” he says. “She was knighted on the eve of the Battle of Winterfell, where she commanded the left flank of the Northern forces.”

“Remarkable,” Willis replies. “Were you present, Lord Lannister?” His voice is flinty with dislike.

“I was. Though not as Lord Lannister, or anything else, save a fellow knight,” Jaime corrects him. “My brother is the head of House Lannister now.”

“And yet you no longer wear the white cloak of a Kingsguard,” Willis observes.

“Well, we haven’t got a king,” Jaime drawls in response, and Brienne suppresses a wince; he sounds like he’s very nearly in the mood to make trouble. She hopes he's not about to steer the conversation into rough waters.

“Indeed,” Willis says. “Your brother was lately Hand to the dragon queen, I believe.”

“And to a Baratheon king before that,” Jaime agrees. “We’ve had rather a lot of kings and queens lately. I do hope the next one will stick.”

She recognizes the old arrogance, the air of unquestioning superiority, but now it reveals itself to her as a role he’s playing, one he’d perhaps played for so long that it had started to feel like his true self. It’s strange to watch him put it on and off like a doublet now, and she understands a little better why he’d been so reluctant to come. And it's not as if he’s being overtly disagreeable, not quite—just coming across a little high-handed, like a man born to a certain position, accustomed to commanding armies and standing next to a throne. Like his father's son. If you didn’t know he was doing it on purpose, you’d assume he was always like this. She had, once.

Swann speaks up then, addressing Brienne. “You’re from a Stormlands house; you served with King Renly. But now you’re sworn to the Starks. How did you come to be so attached to the North?”

“A Stark may well be the next king or queen of us all, if the seven kingdoms are still united this time next year,” Jaime says, before she can respond. “It will surely be of some benefit to Tarth, and the rest of the Stormlands, to have strong ties at Winterfell.”

“Perhaps so,” Swann replies. “I merely wondered how your loyalties became so…far-reaching, _Ser_ Brienne.” The title carries an unpleasant note, in his mouth; he’s not pleased to address her as a fellow knight.

Jaime’s voice comes cutting across the table. “Show the lady some respect, Ser Jorah. She avenged Renly, you know.”

Willis turns his stern gaze from Jaime to Brienne. “How so?” he asks.

“I slew Stannis, after the Battle of the Bastards,” she tells him. "He admitted his guilt, before I executed him for his crimes.” The table is suddenly quiet, and she can feel every eye in the room on her now.

“And the red witch who was hanging about him at Dragonstone? I heard it was her who did the dark magic that killed the king,” Penrose puts in, sounding rather excited about it. She supposes it's a good sign that the truth has spread this far, and not just the rumors and false tellings, many of which featured her as a side character or the butt of a joke, if not the main villain.

“She also died in the North, but not at my hand,” Brienne says, preferring not to explain any further. She’s still unnerved when she thinks of Melisandre, thinks of her slim white hands setting a ditch full of wood alight while the waves of the dead came rushing in behind her. Davos had sworn that he'd watched her die, after, and Brienne had taken in the haunted cast of his eyes and mouth and decided she didn’t want to know the rest. She’s not sure what strange tales these men and women have heard of the great war in the North, of White Walkers and armies of dead people and ancient, foreign prayers that could make swords and arakhs burst into flame. She might not believe them herself, if she’d stayed at home and never seen it with her own eyes. But they seem to believe her about Stannis, anyway, and for the remainder of the meal the atmosphere is a little less chilly, if somewhat subdued.

“What a miserable old shitbird,” Jaime says, once they’re safely back inside her cabin aboard the _Petrel_. “Almost makes me miss the company of his arsehole of a cousin, by comparison.”

“He’s not a pleasant man, but he’s been a capable and faithful steward to Storm’s End, if my father’s letters are any indication,” Brienne says slowly, sitting on the bed to pull off her boots. The prospect of having to deal with Lord Willis indefinitely, in the eventual capacity of the Evenstar’s duties— _if I stay_ —isn’t one she particularly likes, but she’d prefer honest competence to good company in that regard. She turns to Jaime, who’s shucking off the red jerkin, like he’s glad to be rid of it and everything it implies. “Thank you, Jaime. I won’t ask it of you again.”

He sighs. “Won’t it be needful, at Evenhall?”

“I don’t think so," she tells him. "My father’s not like these men. And Tarth is rather less grand. It’s not poor, exactly, at least not when the pirates aren’t stopping the trade fleets and disrupting the fishing and the harvest. But it’s hard to keep up a fancy atmosphere when everyone’s preoccupied with herding sheep and mending sails and the prospects for fair winds and a good catch. It’s one of the reasons I liked it, being in the North—it felt more like home.”

“Except for the bloody weather.”

“Except for that.” She yawns. “I don’t miss the cold. In another month or two the sea will be warm enough to swim in, on the straitside beaches.”

He smiles at her, then. “And I take it you’re an excellent swimmer?”

Brienne’s smiling back; it’s like a reflex, unstoppable. “I was, as a girl. It’s been some time since I’ve been anywhere warm enough. It would be helpful, I think, for getting my strength back. Easier than training hard, although I wish I could do that first.”

“Mmm,” he agrees, in a tone of sympathy—yes, he’s faced that himself, the unpleasant task of regaining ground in a changed body. “I’ll spar with you when you’re up to it again,” he promises, sitting on the stool to take off his hook and boots. “Might try swimming, too, although I haven’t yet, with just one hand. I used to be quite good once. I grew up by the sea too, you know.” She can’t help but envision it, then: his bare body cutting through the waves, a young man, golden and beautiful, still unmarred and whole. She looks at him, sitting there in his thin linen undershirt, fine enough that she can make out the texture of the hair on his chest, see his nipples pebbled under the cloth, and her mouth goes dry with want. He glances back at her, catches her heated gaze, and goes still. Her blood is thrumming in her ears.

“Come here,” she tells him, quietly, and he comes up like he’s drawn on a string, as she rises to her full height to face him. He stops in front of her, just inches away, breathing hard, and she puts her hands on him and reels him in and kisses him, hungry and a little bit desperate. This feeling has been pent up in her for so long, first by sheer force of will—after he’d left, she’d built the dam back high and strong, tried to block out any memory of desire—and later, her body had been too broken and weak to spare any room for it. Now it floods back in, coursing through every part of her. Jaime’s back is warm under her hands, and he’s returning her kisses with equal fervor, until restraint catches up with him and he pauses, drawing himself back to look up into her eyes.

“Are you sure?” he says softly, his thumb tracing the lacing at the back of her tunic. “Only if you’re sure.”

She is. “Yes,” she whispers, and reaches for the hem of his shirt, pulling it up and over his head, the way she had the very first time. Then she turns away from him, catching his fingers and bringing them back to the laces, and shivers a little as he pulls them undone, one-handed, taking his time. When the tunic falls loose from her shoulders, she shoves it off and untucks the sleeveless shift from the waistline of her breeches, pulling it over her head and turning back around, bared to her waist. She draws him close again, her breasts pressing against his chest, and he bends his head to kiss the scars at her shoulder. The touch of his mouth makes her gasp, and then she can’t be slow any longer; she goes for his breeches and then hers, makes fast work of the laces and the rest, and when they’re both bare head to toe, she takes his hand and pulls him onto the bed.

It’s at once too much and not enough, feeling the warm length of him all along her, as he leans in to kiss her again and again, his hand stroking her cheek, her arm, the faint curve of her breasts. She’s missed this so much, missed him, missed the way her body feels when it’s matched with his, nothing between them but skin. He’s hard and panting already, but he stills himself, says, “Tell me if I’m hurting you,” and she nods. Then he braces his hand to the bed and kisses all the way down to her belly, and lower still. He shoves his stump under her thigh, lifting it up, and puts his mouth to her, and she remembers the first time he’d done this, the morning after their first night together, teasing and triumphant at her blushing, bewildered delight. Her skin is prickling with fire. She’s easily overwhelmed now, undone by the sensation of his lips and his tongue on her, and when he adds the slow drag of his fingers below, it’s almost too strong, too soon, and she comes in a shaky, trembling rush, biting her lip so she doesn't cry out. Jaime rests his head on her hip, catching his breath while she cards her fingers through his hair.

“Come back here,” she tells him, after a moment, and tugs his head up to kiss him, feeling him tremble as she strokes down his flanks, runs a palm over his cock. “Your hand is enough,” he says, breath hot on her cheek, “you’re still healing, I don’t want to hurt you,” and it’s enough for him, maybe, but not for her. “I want you in me,” she whispers, quiet so no one will hear them through the thin walls. It takes a few moments of rearranging themselves to figure it out; he shifts her around gently until she’s on her right side, facing him, so he’s not putting any of his weight on her. She misses that, too, being pressed down into the bed with the burden of him, but this is good, this works, and if it leaves his hand trapped between them, he doesn’t seem to mind—just cups her breast, fondling the nipple, while she grips his arse with both hands and pulls him inside. He thrusts into her slowly, moaning against her shoulder, and it doesn’t last long before his pace begins to stutter, his body shaking as she runs her palms down his back. He pulls out, sudden, on the brink, and lets her put her hand on his cock to finish him, gasping for breath and groaning her name. It’s not quite the best they’ve managed—not like some of those nights in Winterfell, when, past the initial awkwardness, they’d learned and tested one another with a delirious, competitive kind of elation—but it’s more than enough. It’s the first time she’s felt at home in her body in months. She cleans her hand on the bedcover, not caring about the mess, and reaches to stroke Jaime’s cheek. When his eyes come open, she thinks there might be tears in them, but he’s smiling at her. He doesn’t say anything, just leans in to kiss her again, soft, and she rolls onto her back and draws his head to her, cradling it between her breasts, running her hands through his hair, listening to him breathe. He’s alive, and hers. It’s more than enough for now.


	8. Sanctuaries Cross the Valleys and Streams (Jaime)

The _Petrel_ finally sets sail right after the mid-morning bell, once the last remnants of the cargo brought down from Storm’s End the night before are loaded and secured. Jaime’s still in bed, enjoying himself. He’d woken up earlier with a fierce cockstand—some hazy but apparently erotic dream interrupted by the loud thump of crates in the hold—and Brienne had woken then, too, and noticed it pressed against the small of her back. She’d stretched and yawned and turned towards him with a _wicked_ little smile, and before he could say anything, she’d just taken him in hand and brought him off then and there, eyes merry and teasing and a bit pleased at her own audacity. He’d taken his time returning the favor, drawing it out until she was grinding up against his fingers, her hips bucking, and holding the pillow to her face to muffle the glorious sounds coming out of her mouth. Then she’d promptly fallen back asleep, her limbs tangled up with his and her hair tickling his nose. It’s by far the best way he’s managed to start any day in a very long time.

So naturally, by the time they’re halfway across the straits that afternoon, he’s started to panic in earnest. The two of them are back in her cabin after a late midday meal up on deck, lounging around on the bed—clothed, now—and talking, enjoying the simple pleasure of each other's company. The ship is due to arrive in Evenfall Harbor by morning, unless the winds change. This is the last night of their voyage. _Fuck._

“What does your father know about me?” he asks Brienne, striving to keep his tone light. He sounds like a wheedling green idiot of a squire.

“I can only speak for what I’ve told him, in my letters,” she says, warily, and he grimaces, because he can guess well enough what the man’s heard from everyone else. “He knows you were my prisoner once, and despite that, saved my life twice on the way to King’s Landing.”

“Twice?” he asks.

“Twice,” she says firmly. “Or you’d still have two hands, and I’d never have made it to Harrenhal and into that bearpit.”

He winces at the memory of the men dragging her away into the trees. He should have returned later, with a Lannister company at his back, and gutted every one of them, Bolton allies or no.

“A fine bargain, then, at the price,” he tells her. “I’d gladly make it again.”

That wins him a sweet, sad smile, which quickly turns into a teasing one: “Also, he may have some questions for you regarding a matter of sapphires. I didn’t really try to explain _that_ , in the letter I sent once we got to King’s Landing.” Jaime groans, and puts his face in his hand.

She continues. “He knows you gifted me a fine sword, and a suit of armor—and Pod, of course, although I didn’t know yet what a true gift that was, when I wrote of it. That I used all of them to defend Sansa and fulfill my oath to Lady Catelyn, and yours. He knows you came north to fight the dead with us, though not why you left, and that it was you who knighted me. I mentioned it when I sent a raven after the battle to let him know I’d survived. And he knows that you offered to see me safely home.”

“All that, to set against my reputation. It’s a flattering list, my lady, but the other end of the scale weighs heavy. Though you might say three times, to even it up a little more."

“Oh?” she asks, puzzled.

“At Riverrun," he explains. "You were ready to fight, but I ended the siege first. Gods know I couldn’t have taken you down, but ten or twelve of my men might have managed it, if they’d found you alongside the Blackfish, stubborn old bastard.”

“It was the Blackfish who put us in the boat,” Brienne reminds him.

“And I who sent no troops to pursue it.”

“My freedom, then, not my life,” she counters.

“All right, I yield—add your freedom to the ledger, then,” he says.

She’s quiet, for a moment. Then—“You wouldn’t have killed them all, everyone in Riverrun.”

He sighs. “No, not all of them, because we’d have won, first. But too many. I was desperate to get back to King’s Landing, then—Tommen was still alive, and he and Cersei were in danger from that sanctimonious cunt and his army of fanatics.” He wonders, again, if he'd have been able to stop it, if he'd made it back in time, before her vicious, unforgivable masterstroke had won that battle and doomed them all.

“Still, you didn’t truly mean it, what you told me,” she says, somewhere between a statement and a question, and he can see that it matters to her, to hear some kind of answer, even if he’s still not sure himself what it would have been.

“I was exaggerating to make a point.” _To break your heart, and keep you from following me._ “In any case, thank gods, we never had to discover far I would have gone in the end. You showed me a better way out, if not quite the one you’d intended, when you turned up with your mad plan. And I took it.” He sighs, thinking of the fear and disgust on Edmure Tully’s face. At least the poor bastard must be out of that dungeon now, and his brat still living. “On second thought, let’s _not_ tell your father about Riverrun.”

Brienne must be able to see it, how worried he is, because she says, “Jaime, it will be all right, truly. He’s a sensible man, not one to judge on the basis of rumor without seeing the evidence for himself. He’ll listen to me. Sansa did, when you came to Winterfell, and she had far better reason to hate you.”

“Ah, but then I was coming only as a man asking to join a battle,” he reminds her, “not….” He pauses.

“What?”

“As a suitor for the hand of the daughter of the house,” he finishes, slowly, the words dragging out like footfalls along a path.

She blinks at him, her eyes gone wide, and he panics some more, babbles. “Brienne, you must realize that we can’t carry on like this, once we’re in Evenfall. I’m not trying to...hurry you, or make assumptions I’ve no right to make, but he’s going to wonder what I’m still doing there, once I’ve seen you home. If you want me to…stay, with you, whether it’s just while you’re visiting or if you choose to remain, there’s no respectable place for me there, unless….” He trails off, uncertain.

“I know,” she tells him, softly. “And I want you to stay, whether it’s Tarth, or the North, or someplace else. There’s not anyone else I want to be with, not as long as I live. It’s just...I'm not sure I'm ready yet to make statements, especially public ones, about…everything that comes with that.” She swallows. “With marriage.”

“It scares me too,” he tells her, because it does. It ought to. She takes vows more seriously than anyone he’s ever met, and he’s broken just about every oath he’s ever made. It’s disastrous. But there's no other option, not for the long term, so they've got to talk about it regardless. “I was thinking more along the lines of betrothal, or the suggestion that one might be forthcoming,” he adds, lightly, trying not to frighten her off. “Particularly since the information that we’ve been sharing a cabin of late may not stay on the ship, once we’re in port.”

“It wasn’t a secret in Winterfell, either,” she reminds him. It’s true, but it's hardly the same thing: half of Winterfell had been fucking the other half, at the time, all the rules of propriety suspended amid shock and relief when the end of the world had turned out not to be the end, after all. And Brienne’s position had granted them additional leeway, not only because she was sworn to Sansa, but because the men there had come to accept her, if sometimes grudgingly, as one of their own, seen her as a fellow fighter and a worthy commander, not as a highborn lady.

He sighs, again. “I know. But we’re not in Winterfell now. And it’s not just your father who’ll be wanting to know. I’m bringing it up because we’ll have to give some answer to the question, when it comes—for the sake of your honor, not mine, and your position as heir.”

“I know my answer,” she tells him. “Just not…the path to it, yet.”

He takes her hand, then, and kisses it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

Brienne shoots him an exasperated look. “Because you’d prefer to worry alone while sitting at other end of the bed, like a fool. Come here.”

“It won’t even be the other end of the bed much longer,” he mourns, complying, nudging her over a little so he can fit into the space beside her. “I can’t go sneaking into your chamber at night, in Evenfall.”

“Don’t be so sure,” she says, fondly, dropping a kiss to his shoulder. “I’ve an idea or two of how we might manage, discreetly.”

“Oh, do you? Sneaking it is, then,” he replies, both relieved and a little dejected. It’s not as if he was looking forward to another stretch of celibacy, not when he’s finally just made it back to her arms. But he hates the idea of being her secret. It’s too familiar, and unpleasantly so. The thought of resuming those practiced habits of deception, especially with Brienne, is difficult to tolerate. He wants it to be different, for once. He wants to be granted leave to love in the daylight, like an honest man.

Brienne catches it, of course, like she almost always does. “Not like that, Jaime. Not forever, or not at all, if you can’t stand it—we can just be very proper and respectable while we’re there, if that’s what you want.”

He chuckles. “It’s all right, sweetling. A little temporary sneaking is fine.”

Her eyes are serious, still. “I’ll make it plain to my father, though, tell him that we have an understanding, though we’re not ready to announce anything yet. He’ll know the truth, of what you are to me—the general shape of it, if not all the details.”

“ _Definitely_ not all the details,” he says, grinning at her. “Or I’ll find myself thrown back in the sea with the rest of the bycatch.”

She laughs, then. “And I’ll fish you out again. I told you I’m a good swimmer. Besides, even if the crew do spread tales, it’s not going to end with you getting thrown in the sea, I promise. Tarth is hardly Dorne, but it’s a little less hidebound than the rest of the mainland when it comes to these things. My father had an acknowledged mistress for more than a decade, you know, when I was younger—Sennike, she was the estranged wife of a sea-trader from Lys. He couldn’t marry her, because her first husband was still alive somewhere, and there was no way to find him and make him agree to a divorce. They took care to have no children, so as not to risk my inheritance—my brother was already gone, years before then—but all of Tarth knew; he treated her as the lady of the hall in everything but name. She died a year or so after I left to answer Renly’s call; I’m not sure if he has someone else as a companion now.”

“It’s one thing for the Lord Evenstar, and another for his unmarried daughter,” Jaime tells her. “Especially if the sea-trader’s wife is a notorious Kingslayer.”

“I know. I’m not asking you to—to stay in that position, indefinitely,” she promises.

He exhales. “So it’s all right, then? For us to at least…consider the matter, between ourselves, privately? And I'll present myself as a sort of undeclared suitor, in the meantime. I promise to behave very nicely.”

She smiles. “Yes, that’s all right, and no, you won’t, but I’m going to enjoy watching you try.”

It’s enough to reassure him, for now, and in any case it’s time to go back up onto the deck, where Corivan has invited them for one last supper along with Symon and a few of the senior crew. Jaime keeps thinking about it, though, thinking about words like _betrothal_ , and  _wife_ , words he'd never thought might mean anything to him, even as he keeps the conversation light and inconsequential. Over the wine, at the end of the meal, he launches into a story about one of his dumber exploits as a squire—involving a tourney, a wager, two equally dumb squires, and an inconveniently located nettleweed patch—and Brienne laughs so much she almost spills the half-cup of wine she’s permitted herself, with Symon’s cautious approval. Then Corivan’s telling a long, lively tale about a trip to Volantis, but Jaime’s not really paying attention. He’s too busy savoring the way the sunset light illuminates her face to him, while the sea wind plays with her hair; it’s a miracle to see her so unguarded again, happy. She catches him staring, and drops her eyes, a knowing little smile playing at her mouth, before she looks back at him once more. He wishes they could stay on the damn ship forever, just keep sailing on into the open waters, shielded from all the questions that await them on land.

It’s not long before Brienne makes her excuses, saying she wants a good night’s sleep before they make landfall in the morning, and he forces himself to linger for a few minutes more—they’re surely not fooling anyone—before making his way back to her cabin, and seizing her up in his arms, pressing his mouth to hers, eager and reckless. It’s the last night they’ll have like this for how long he can't know, and he’s determined to make the most of it, sleep be damned.

In Winterfell, he’d found to his delight that Brienne was as forthright in bed as out of it, and if she’d been a little awkward and self-conscious at the beginning, it certainly hadn’t dampened her enthusiasm, or the practical, determined way she’d set about rectifying the gaps in her knowledge, and his own. And sweet gods, she’d been a fast learner—it had been a joy to watch her transform her fighter’s instinctive understanding of her body, its strength and reflexes and capabilities, into a lover’s. She’d matched him bout for bout with a familiar competitive spirit, and a rising sort of wonder dawning behind her eyes all the while. Even torn and self-doubting as he’d been then, a sorry excuse for a lover, he’d marveled at his luck, to be witness to that discovery, to be making it alongside her.

And it _had_ been a discovery for him, too, he thinks, undressing her now with laughing abandon—he’d never had the chance to explore someone new, someone different, before. He’d been fucking Cersei for so long he scarcely remembered what it was like at the start, and even before they’d started fucking, she’d been as familiar to him as his own self. Whereas Brienne is a revelation, every part of her new and thrilling, even now: he's constantly astonished by her size, her strength, her extraordinarily long legs, the sculpted musculature of her back and torso and calves and forearms, by the scars he can’t stop kissing on her shoulder. He’s so hard he can barely contain himself. He remembers calling her a great beast of a woman; he’s ashamed of how he meant it, then, but it’s still marvelously true: a glorious beast, more than a match for a lion, like something out of a wonder-tale, like a unicorn. He’s a little drunk, he thinks. He ought to say something.

“Will you go astride, Ser?” he mumbles into her shoulder, feeling her shiver as his fingers stroke the wet folds of her cunt. “If you’re up to it,” he adds, mindful of her injuries. But he misses the way she’d pinned him to the bed, before, held him down and taken her pleasure from him as he lay gasping against the furs, gripped between her remarkably strong thighs.

Brienne whimpers at his touch, and nips his ear: “I think I can manage,” she says, a little breathless. “I’d like to.” He’s grateful beyond words, now that they’re bedding each other again, to discover that whatever harm he may have done to her spirit, it hasn’t crippled her assurance in this respect. She’s not shy of him, of their bodies, and the only constraints they face are the physical ones. She settles atop him carefully, bracing herself on her right arm, and he puts his hand on her hip, shoring her up so she doesn’t need to put any weight on her weak side. A soft whine escapes his mouth as she takes hold of his cock and positions herself, and then she’s sliding down onto him, hot and tight, and he has to bite his lip until he tastes blood to keep himself from spending then, just from the feel of her. They rock into one another, finding the rhythm, and he closes his eyes so he can make this last, hold himself back from the brink, until he can tell that she’s close, grinding herself against him, making those little high-pitched noises he loves, slowing to a torturous, deliberate pace, and he takes his hand off her hip and fumbles it to where they’re joined, giving her that last bit of friction and pressure she needs—and then she’s there, convulsing around his cock, thighs crushing his hips, moaning with release.

He shoves at her hip, as gently as his desperation will allow—she’s got to get off him _now_ , he’s going to come—but she doesn’t, she just bends over him and whispers, “I’ll find moon tea in Evenfall, don’t stop,” into his ear—and then she nips it again and he’s spilling inside her, in sweet long pulses, his mind fragmenting, shattered by pleasure.

By the time he recovers, she’s pushed herself off to lie down at his side, comfortable and warm, and he drags her close again, missing the weight of her already, kissing her, tasting the coppery tang of his bitten lip. _This_ , he thinks. This now and forever. He’ll make any vow she wants of him, in exchange for being granted this sanctuary, and find a way to make himself worthy of it. 

The bulky green mass of Tarth is visible through her window when they wake, at dawn. Brienne rises to dress, lacing on the azure tunic she’d worn at Storm’s End, and buckling her swordbelt over it. It reassures him, the thought of Oathkeeper at her side as she strides into her father’s hall. It’s a better token of his promise than any crimson-and-gold cloak. Jaime retreats to his cabin and, after a pause, opens the chest from Tyrion, ignoring the crumpled jerkin in Lannister colors, shoved ignominiously to the bottom of the pile. He picks out a dark blue shirt, the cloth fine but not luxurious, and an open-necked jacket in buttery fawn-colored leather to go over it: not gaudy, but respectable. It’s a little nerve-wracking, to be considering how best to present himself as a potential bridegroom, now that he actually means it, not like when Tywin had shopped him around as a boy. He’s glad Brienne had persuaded him to let the ship’s cook, who doubles as its barber, trim his hair and beard before their stopover at Storm’s End. He buckles on the hook, and pulls on the good pair of boots Tyrion had supplied, putting away the worn pair he’s had on since King’s Landing. Once everything is securely packed away and ready to be carried ashore, he heads up to the deck to find Brienne, standing at the rail and watching as Evenfall Harbor comes into view.

The light is shining on the blue water—it truly is the color of sapphires, he thinks—and over the green hills, which rise to higher peaks in the distance, shrouded with morning mist. The port town is small, just a cluster of low buildings by the docks, with a ring of houses rising along the crescent-shaped bowl of land curving up from the waterfront. The buildings are white-washed or painted in bright colors, but a little unkempt, like the people who live there have had better things to do lately than worry about keeping up appearances. He sees it all doubled, through his own eyes, but also reflected through hers: the sight of home after a long absence, now set in contrast to everything she’s seen in the years since sailing away. When they finally come ashore, Jaime watches her scanning the crowd gathered at the docks for familiar faces, smiling at those she recognizes, exclaiming her surprise when she realizes a gangly youth in a yellow coat is a boy she once knew, now grown to manhood. They leave Corivan to manage the unloading of the cargo, and the young man in yellow—Bryce, he’s called—fetches a pair of horses to carry them up the hill to Evenfall.

The keep is a small one, compared to the grand edifices of Casterly Rock or Storm's End, but it’s lovely, coming into view as they rise up the path: star-shaped, with an array of small glass windows sparkling in the sunlight, set atop the ridge overlooking the harbor on a rocky promontory that tumbles down to the point where the lighthouse beacon stands watch. Brienne’s face is shining, as they come to the gates: she’s happy, and it makes him happy to watch, to see her greeted so warmly—for all that she may have felt misplaced among them as a child, the people here seem glad to welcome her home. There’s a small crowd in the courtyard, shouts going up to herald their arrival, and as they dismount they’re surrounded by folk who all seem to know her, and who have little attention to spare for the man at her side. It’s only when a tall white-haired fellow throws his arms around her and she nearly dissolves into tears that he realizes this man in plain blue wool, wearing no marks of high rank, is the Evenstar himself. Selwyn Tarth has his daughter’s broad shoulders, the same high forehead and long nose. He looks thin, for his large frame—the man's been in ill-health, Jaime remembers, but it doesn’t seem to dampen his joy now. Brienne embraces him for a long moment, exchanging greetings and reassurances with a teary laugh or two, and then she turns to look at Jaime, who’s hanging back at a distance, not wanting to disturb their reunion. She waves him over, smiling, and he goes, hearing her words—“This is Ser Jaime Lannister; I’ve told you about him"—as he draws close.

Jaime takes a deep breath, bows to her father. “My lord Evenstar,” he says, his head coming back up to be met with a familiar blue gaze.

“Thank you, Ser Jaime,” the man tells him, his baritone deep and warm, “for bringing my treasure home at last.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've finally got them to Tarth, but the story's not finished yet. Thanks so much for all the kind comments! Next chapter should go up sometime this weekend, I hope.
> 
> Also, [this is Brienne's smile](https://gryffindorsnotebook.tumblr.com/post/184603420420/how-is-gwendoline-christie-supposed-to-play-an), at the supper table. I'm guessing it's from a behind-the-scenes shot, since she rarely smiles in the show, but if I'm wrong, someone _please_ tell me which episode to hunt down.


	9. The Wheel and the Plow (Brienne)

Brienne finds her father in the solar, a line furrowed deep in his forehead as he makes his way through a pile of ledgers. The marble quarries in the east of Tarth have been inactive for years now, with no men to spare to hew the stone and no oxen to drag it to port, nor much of a market for it on a mainland spending all its coin on war. As he explains the impact it's had on their trade, she finds herself thinking aloud: “They’ll be needing marble for the rebuilding of King’s Landing, soon if not already. We might see if we can bring some folk over from the Stormlands at a good rate of pay, reopen at least one of the quarries. You could write to Willis Baratheon and see if he’ll put out a call.”

Her father smiles. “And here I thought you didn’t get on with Lord Willis.”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t enjoy his company, and I daresay he didn’t like mine, but we managed to reach an agreement despite it. And I think we parted on better terms than we began; Ser Jaime helped, there.”

“Is that so?” says her father. “He seems to hold you in high regard.”

Brienne feels her cheeks reddening. She’d told him, once they finally had a moment alone late on the day of her arrival, that Jaime had asked for her hand and she was considering the offer, and that she’d invited him to remain at Evenfall while the two of them discussed it. Selwyn’s eyebrows had risen, maybe just at the graceless way she’d blurted out the words, but he’d simply replied that he was glad to welcome her guest. In the days since, she’s danced around the topic, unable to explain the depth of her feelings without revealing too much about the reasons they’re so fraught.

“As I do him,” she tells her father, and then she feels compelled to keep going. “He’s a complicated man,” she says. “What I’ve told you in my letters is true. And I’m sure you’ve heard many other things, too—some are true, and some aren’t, and some are only partly so. It's hard to explain, and most of it's not mine to tell.” She pauses. “It hasn’t always been easy between us, but I’ve come to trust him. I hope you will as well.”

Selwyn nods, his eyes fond and knowing. “He brought you back to me, my dear, and cared for you while you were injured. That’s enough to warrant keeping an open mind, until I come to know him better.”

Brienne smiles, then, and tries to bury the anxiety that grips her whenever she looks at him now. Her joy at seeing him again is tempered by the shock of how much older he seems—almost frail, where he’d been strong and hearty in her memory all this time. The guilt she feels, for being absent so long, for making him worry about her safety, while he weathered an illness obviously more serious than his letters had implied, has been pricking at her constantly since her arrival. She hopes he’s not been lonely, with Sennike long gone; there’s no one else at his side now. When she says as much, he waves away her dismay. “Denys has been a great help to me, these past few years,” he says, meaning the current household steward, a rangy man with a stiff brush of salt-and-pepper hair, who hails from Morne on the eastern shore. He’s roughly of her father’s generation, maybe a decade younger, and is somehow bookish and energetic at once—he’s clearly taken on much of the burden of managing Evenfall’s affairs, and seems well-equipped to keep doing so. But he’d ridden off two days previously for a regular circuit around the isle, so Brienne stays, now, and helps her father through the papers as best she can. When he falls asleep in his armchair between one page and the next, she covers him with a warm blanket, and studies his dear face, so much thinner and more deeply lined, before retreating in the hope that he’ll spend the remainder of the afternoon resting.

Jaime finds her, an hour later, on the balcony overlooking the straits, where she can pretend it’s the wind off the sea that’s whipping tears into her eyes. He takes one look at her and walks over to fold her into his arms, without a word. After a minute, he says, “Come sit down, this is easier when you’re not upright,” and she laughs, a damp sound that’s halfway to a sob, and lets him tow her to the bench against the wall and draw her down beside him. And it is easier, then, to lean on him, and hide her face in his shoulder, to let him to put his hand in her hair and hold it there while she just breathes, until it stops feeling quite so much like her ribs are still broken. She thinks about the way he’d held her while she sobbed in her cabin, about how long it’s been since anyone’s comforted her like that—not since her father, when she was very small. She’d learned to hide her tears as a child, so as not to worry him, so he wouldn’t ever know the truth of what people said about her and how it made her feel. She wonders, now, if she’d really managed to deceive him, or if he’d just taken it as a sign that she didn’t want him to intervene. It must have been hard for him, without her mother there, to know how to navigate those waters. Jaime’s hand is warm against her scalp, his thumb stroking her hairline.

“He looks so much older,” she says, eventually. “I didn’t realize how bad it’s been, and I haven’t been here to help him through any of it.”

“He wouldn’t have wanted you to worry; he knew you were needed where you were,” Jaime says, his voice muffled against her hair. “He’s happy to have you home. He’s all right, now. You’ll be all right.” It’s almost enough to make her believe it.

“It’s just hard to bear,” she tells his shoulder, avoiding his eyes.

“I know,” he says. “But you don’t have to bear it alone.” And that’s a disorienting thought, because she’s always borne things alone; she’s had no choice. If she thinks about it too much, her mind will start spinning, tilting off some axis, so she doesn't. But she’s calmer, now, enough to hug Jaime back and thank him, and go inside to clean herself up for supper.

Amid the burdens of work and worry about her father, though, there’s the pleasant, unfolding diversion of introducing Jaime to Evenfall. She shows him the whole of the keep, from the kitchens to the topmost tower; though she’s already shown him the little stair that makes it easy to slip, unnoticed, from the corridor where he’s staying to her chambers a story above. She walks him through the gardens and stables, and they linger in the armory and the training yard, where she tells him about her early lessons with her father, and later Ser Goodwin, and tries not to look too longingly at the practice swords racked on the wall. Symon’s been dispatched to an aging maester on the south shore who has need of an apprentice, so she’s no longer dogged by his cautious oversight, but she knows she’s not quite ready to take up a blade yet. _Soon_ , she promises herself, and leads Jaime out to explore the orchards instead. They go down to the harbor to bid Corivan farewell—he’s sailing for Sunspear, with a hold full of wool and smoked fish and whale oil to trade for perfume and silk and wine. It’s market day, so they stroll around the stalls, Brienne gathering her wits enough to exchange greetings with all the curious locals who want to hear about her travels and her feats in the wars. They seem glad to have her home, even as the weight of their attention and their expectations rests heavy on her mind. She buys two berry tarts from the baker’s stall and watches as Jaime bites into his, the pastry flaking in his beard, and tells him that the berries come from the mountains, and if they’re ripe for picking, that means it’s spring.

Later, she takes him to the crypts hewed into the rock under Evenfall, and shows him the tomb of her mother and the stillborn sister who’d taken her mother with her, and beside them, that of her brother, drowned some five years later. He’s quiet, looking at the carved stone. “My mother’s at Casterly Rock,” he says, eventually. “My father was in the Sept of Baelor, with Joffrey, and later Myrcella, too. All blasted to dust, now. After Tommen died, Cersei had his body burnt, and the ashes sent there to keep them company.”

“Do you know what happened to her, afterwards?” she asks, treading carefully.

He blinks, like he hadn’t realized she doesn’t already know. “Yes—Tyrion buried her, secretly; we weren’t speaking at the time, but he showed me where, later. In a little grove, beyond the city walls. There’s no stone to mark the grave, but it’s quiet there—full of linden trees, and laurels. It's pretty. It must be fragrant, now, if it’s spring.”

She takes his hand, gives it a soft squeeze. “Good,” she tells him. “I’m glad he he was able to show you.”

He nods. “It’s a good place. Peaceful. Gods know she wasn’t a very peaceable woman, in life, but…it’s helpful, to know that she’s resting now.”

 _And that maybe she’ll finally let you rest, too,_ she thinks, but she doesn’t say it aloud.

The weather grows warmer each day, and one bright morning Brienne wakes up longing for the sensation of water on her skin. Over breakfast, she suggests an excursion to a little cove she knows, tucked between two rocky outcrops an hour’s ride north of Evenfall. “If it won’t be too tiring for you,” Jaime says, but she can see he’s eager as well, and he lets her convince him. They take it slowly, so it’s a longer ride than she’d remembered, but maybe that’s because she keeps stopping to show him a good view of the sea, a little waterfall, a grove of wild apple trees, now in blossom. It’s midday when they finally tie up the horses at the treeline above the dunes and stroll down to the water, pulling off their boots to enjoy the warmth of the sand underfoot.

Brienne tugs up the hems of her breeches and walks into the cool, foaming surf. “It’s not warm, exactly,” she tells him, “but it’s close enough, if you want to go in—there’s no undertow here, and the currents aren’t strong.” Jaime grins, his crow’s feet crinkling, and gets his hook off and strips out of his tunic and trousers with haste. She’s a little slower to undress—it’s somehow more daunting, doing so in the open air—and by the time she’s finished, he’s already bounding into the sea in one great rush, diving under the waves and surfacing again, shaking the water from his hair and beard like a dog. He turns to face her as she wades in slowly, still grinning like a boy. “It’s not so cold,” he tells her, “not once you’re all the way in,” and when she reaches him he grabs her by the waist and swings her around like they’re dancing. A wave catches her in the face and she snorts, seawater going up her nose and stinging her throat, but she’s laughing too hard to care. She spots him while he paddles around experimentally, getting used to moving through the water one-handed, and when she’s sure he’s steady, she launches away and swims the length of the cove and back again, twice, feeling the sweet burn in her arms and legs and lungs. Her teeth are chattering by the time she’s done, but she lays back and floats in the warm water near the surface a little longer, before she lets him persuade her ashore.

Jaime rolls out the blanket he’d carried down from his saddlebag, and stretches out on his back, eyes closed, to bask in the sunshine. Brienne settles onto her stomach, instead, propping her herself up on an elbow just for the pleasure of looking at him. He’s gained back enough weight that he’s no longer gaunt, but his limbs are still long and spare, muscles visible even if there’s a little softness around his waist, now. The breeze off the water is stirring the line of hair on his belly, where it thickens down the slope to his groin, and she feels the hair on her arms prickle to alertness, aware of the same air moving over her drying skin. He opens his eyes and catches her watching, so she leans down to kiss him, and his hand settles in the small of her back and anchors her there while she tastes the salt on his mouth and in his beard. "Not here," he says, after a minute, "or we’ll get sand _everywhere_ ,” so she laughs and follows him uphill, stopping to gather their discarded clothing, until they find a soft patch of grass to spread the blanket on and spend the rest of the afternoon enjoying one another, grateful that there’s no one in earshot but the horses.

On the ride back to Evenfall, she tells him about the discussions she’s having with her father regarding Tarth and its future, and the conversation spills over into personal terrain, to their future. It’s easier, somehow, keeping her eyes on the path and minding the reins, to talk about the possibilities, about what they might want, and where it might take them. It’s Jaime who, a little hesitantly, brings up the prospect of children. They’ve been careful about taking precautions here, as they had in Winterfell. She knows he doesn’t want to sire another bastard, and she doesn’t want to give him one. The unasked question before her is whether she could possibly give him something else: another chance.

“Is it something you want?” he asks. “Not for the sake of an heir for Tarth. For yourself.”

Brienne’s having trouble making sense of her ambivalence, and she struggles to explain. “It’s not that I can’t imagine wanting to raise a child, or loving one, especially if it was yours,” she tells him. “That part’s easier. It’s the bearing and birthing one that scares me. My mother died of it.”

“Mine, too,” he reminds her. “I wouldn’t ask you to risk yourself, not unless it was something you were sure you wanted.” She thinks of Lady Catelyn, then; thinks _it’s a bloody business,_ and _what comes after is even harder._ But she also thinks about the flaring joy on Catelyn’s face each time she’d been reunited with Robb, about how she’d longed to get back to her small boys at Winterfell, about the desperate lengths she’d gone to in order to secure her daughters’ freedom. If not for the force of that love, she’d never have known Jaime at all. He’d have died in the mud in a cage in the Riverlands, murdered by vengeful Karstarks.

“I wouldn’t want to try right away,” she tells him. “And it may be too late, you know—it may not be possible at all.” There’s no real reason to think so; her courses are regular, and she’s not too old—it’s always just seemed faintly improbable to her that her unwomanly body might be capable of such a thing. And she’s afraid of being weak and ungainly, for so many months at a time, especially when she’s just getting her strength back now. “But I’m not…set against it, if we’re both ready, someday. And it does matter, the issue of an heir; I can’t not consider that part. If I stay here, I ought to try, before too many years pass.” _Before my father is gone._ “If not, then my father will need to choose someone else, a cousin or a foster-son, to be Evenstar in my stead, so it won’t be such a concern.”

Jaime just nods. “All right. Let’s wait until you’ve decided that matter first, and the rest can keep until then.” She wants to ask him what _he_ wants, but she knows it’s hard for him to talk about, so she lets the conversation meander elsewhere for now.

Denys returns three days later, full of useful news and entertaining gossip from the mountains and the eastern shore. He’s explaining a new contraption some fellow in Craghaven’s devised, though not managed to build, in hopes of repelling pirate raids—it sounds like a horizontal trebuchet mounted on a cliffside, and Jaime’s eyes are dancing at the image it conjures—when there’s a knock on the door. He breaks off to answer it, and comes back with a scroll in his hand.

“There’s been a raven from King’s Landing,” he says. “It’s addressed to you, Ser Brienne, ‘and to the household at Evenfall.’”

She takes it from him and cracks the seal open, and glances in Jaime’s direction. “It’s from your brother,” she tells him, before unrolling it to read aloud:

> “My dear Ser Brienne,
> 
> I write with best wishes for your continued recovery, and to inform you and the Lord Evenstar of the outcome of the kingsmoot. King—"

Brienne halts for a moment, astonished, and then goes on, more slowly—

> “King Brandon Stark, first of his name, has been crowned this day in King’s Landing, by unanimous choice of those gathered for the purpose. I have accepted the charge of serving as his Hand. Lady Sansa is to be crowned Queen in the North at Winterfell, but will hold the North to rest of these kingdoms in exchange for freedom in internal matters. Yara Greyjoy has made the same promise for the Iron Islands, and Prince Quentyn Martell for Dorne, and the crown will govern the remainder directly. I send on behalf of the King his assurance to Tarth and the Stormlands that he will rule with a fair hand, and guard the peace as all our lands recover from the late wars. Jon Snow, who will be known by no other name, is to live beyond the Wall and never come south of the Neck again, though he shall have the freedom of the North at Queen Sansa’s leave. King Bran tells me my brother is still with you; please give him my love, and tell him the steward at Casterly Rock reports all is well in the Westerlands.
> 
> Signed, Lord Tyrion Lannister, Hand to the King.”

She lowers the paper, letting it curl back into a scroll, and sees how pale and still Jaime’s face has gone.

“Brandon Stark,” says her father, rolling the name in his mouth. “An unexpected choice, I take it?”

“Yes,” Brienne says, slowly, thinking of the boy’s silences, his unearthly eyes, his wheeled chair. “But…a unanimous one, he says. And Bran has the greensight, as well as other gifts that are hard to explain. It might be a good thing, for such a man to hold the throne.”

“Not a man,” says Jaime, very quietly. “Or…not an ordinary man, not any more. Perhaps he’ll make a better king, for that.”

“Well,” says Selwyn, lifting his wineglass, “to King Brandon Stark, first of his name, long may he reign.”

“Long may he reign,” they echo the toast, although Jaime’s voice is little more than a whisper, joining in. Then her father asks about Tyrion, and he collects himself enough to provide a flattering, though not falsified, account of his brother’s abilities and how they might serve this strange new king.

She goes to his chamber, later that night, even though it’s the second day of her courses and she’s in no mood for bedplay. She’s still worried about his response to the news. Brienne knows that of all the sins in Jaime’s past, Bran’s maiming is the one that weighs heaviest on him; it’s the one that haunts her the most, too. It had been no accident that he’d named it first, when he listed the terrible things he’d done for Cersei.

When she comes in, though, he’s already asleep, curled up tight on his side, so she drapes her robe on a chair and crawls in and wraps herself around him. She wakes, later, to find him thrashing at the covers, gasping for air: a nightmare, the first in some time. But once he realizes she’s there, he lets her stroke his back, soothing him, until finally he speaks, hoarse like he’s confessing it all over again: “I keep dreaming of him at the window. Except sometimes I look back and it’s _you_ , with me in the tower, and other times, I look down after I push him, and see Tyrion, falling.” A shudder goes through him, and Brienne doesn’t know what to say, so she just holds him tight.

After a moment, he continues. “I thought I was protecting Cersei, and the children. Robert would have slaughtered them, the moment he found out, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop it—if I didn’t die trying to, he’d have made me _watch_. But they all died anyway, despite it. I wonder if I doomed them, with that act.”

Brienne shakes her head, then. “It’s not possible to know. But you didn’t start the war with it, Jaime, however wrong it was. Littlefinger had already poisoned Arryn; Bran said as much, to Sansa and Arya. He wanted Ned Stark dead. Whatever responsibility you bear for the suffering of their house, it’s not yours alone. And you’ve done what you can to repay that debt. You sent me to save Sansa. You brought the other half of Ned Stark’s sword back to Winterfell; you were willing to die defending it.”

He makes an unconvinced sound, and rolls on his back to stare at the ceiling, but he lets her take his hand. She wonders if he’s aware how revealing it is, the way he responds to such simple gestures of comfort, to just having someone listen, when he’s in one of these moods, and offer reassurance, rather than the judgment or derision he seems to expect. She thinks it might be equally obvious to him how she feels when he looks at her with adoration, or ardent desire: like it’s something too unexpected to have even wished for.

“Are you worried he’ll seek some kind of revenge, now that he’s king?” she asks, knowing even as she says it that the idea is ludicrous; whatever he might be, Bran’s beyond caring about that now.

“No. I spoke to him in Winterfell, told him I was sorry for it, and he said I’d still be the man I was then if I hadn’t done it, and he’d still be Brandon Stark, not what he is now. The way he said it, he might have been talking about something that happened a century ago, to a boy he’d never set eyes on.” He sounds haunted, at the memory.

“Then be the man you are now, and take him at his word,” she tells him. “I’ll hold you to it, if you need my help.”

She feels him exhale. “Because you won’t let me bear it alone? It’s a good thing you've got strong shoulders, my lady knight.” He’s mumbling, now, growing drowsy again, so she curls herself back around him, holding on, and decides to stay the night, propriety be damned—to see him through to the dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm traveling this week, so it may be a few more days between updates, but I hope to have the story finished soon. Next time: a ship with a direwolf banner sails into Evenfall Harbor.
> 
> Thank you for reading, and for all the kind comments! And for the Emily Wilson stans: yes, "a complicated man" is deliberate.


	10. The Mountains are Filled (Jaime)

“You’re still slow on the backstep,” Jaime says, breathing hard.

Brienne scowls and brings her blade down on his, faster this time, and the blow resonates through his arm, until he manages to scrape it away and counter with an undercut.

He blocks her, and dances back a step, before he strikes again and she parries with brutal efficiency, pushing him into a retreat towards the wall, her mouth starting to curl up. He lets her chase him around the ring, catching his breath, before bringing his blade up again and— _hah_ —achieving a complicated three-step approach from the side, _that’ll give her something to think about_ , even if it’s hardly sufficient to stop her.

“Better,” he says, taunting, and relishes the way her eyes flare at him as she brings her arm back up for another devastating blow.

They’re sparring for the first time since Winterfell, and they’re both out of practice, though Jaime’s still no real match for her, not left-handed. He’s left off the hook—he’s eager to explore how he might wield it in tandem with a blade, but he doesn’t want to risk it with her, not until her reflexes are back up to speed. Still, they’re both enjoying themselves, and if he can’t hope to beat her, he can draw on his decades of experience to deliver some pointers, along with a bit of needling, for her benefit. He’d had better instruction, and more years of it; his footwork is more graceful, if a little showy, while she’s always relied on brute force—and a perfect, innate instinct for movement—to make up for the deficiencies in her training. It’s a pleasure to watch her, sleeves rolled up to expose her forearms, shirt dampening with sweat, the whole length of her body pacing and lunging in the bright sunlight of the training yard.

Brienne’s pace is quickening, now—she’d started out hesitant and frustrated, hyper-aware of what she’s lost and noticing only the shortcomings. He remembers the feeling. She’s a little slower than she was before, her arm weaker, her reflexes dulled, but at least she doesn’t have to relearn how to do everything backwards. It will come back to her fast, he thinks. And as they keep going, the dull metal of the practice swords clanging and scraping, the movement starts to flow, and he sees it transform her, beat by beat, until she’s caught up in the current, responding to his every move without thinking about it, suddenly alight with reclaimed joy. Her face is glowing, cheeks rosy and eyes bright; he hasn’t seen her look like this (save for some moments in bed, which he shouldn’t think about now, he’s getting distracted) in months. When she finally disarms him, she laughs outright, giddy as a girl, and it’s all he can do not to sweep her into his arms and kiss her. People are watching, he reminds himself. This must look enough like a bedding already, just from the way they’re smiling at each other, both of them flushed and panting.

“Again, Ser?” he asks, retrieving his sword from the dirt, and she smiles and dives in with a swing, giving him no quarter, so he’s blocking and turning and parrying, and now he wants to shout, too, from the rush of it. His blood is up, and the call-and-response of their blades is singing to him, reeling him in. He wishes, desperately, that he could have his right hand back, just for an hour: _oh_ , what a match it would be. But he knows what he traded it for, now, and he’d choose this every time—and it occurs to him how fitting it is, that the last bout he’d fought with it, abrupt and undignified though it was, was with _her_ : one last dance, a farewell kiss to what he’d thought was the best part of himself.

They’ve been at it for almost an hour when a boy comes running into the yard and interrupts them with a shout to say there are visitors coming. “The ship sailed into the harbor an hour ago,” he says, “flying a direwolf flag,” and Brienne lowers her sword, eyes going wide.

“Go,” Jaime says to her, “I’ll clean up here and find you later,” and she nods, grateful, and follows the boy out of the yard. So he’s still racking up the swords, head dripping from a quick dunk in the water trough, when Arya Stark saunters in, smirking, hand on the hilt of that delicate needle of a blade she always carries, and the dagger that ended a war strapped beside it at her waist.

“You’re still here,” she says, looking him over, speculative.

“I am,” Jaime tells her. “Ser Brienne is in the keep—“

“I know,” she cuts him off. “Gendry’s speaking with her and her father, discussing their business at Storm’s End. I told her I’d join them later.”

“Is that where you’re sailing to?” he asks.

“I’m taking him there,” Arya says. “And then I’m going to Sunspear, and Oldtown, and when I’ve seen them, I’m going to sail into the Sunset Sea and see what’s out there, beyond it.”

Jaime blinks. “Is Lord Baratheon joining you on this voyage? I got the impression he’d like to go wherever you're heading.”

Arya lifts her chin, shakes her head. “He’s going to Storm’s End. It’s his home now, and he’ll be busy there, being a lord. He’ll be a good one, you know, a lord who knows what it’s like when the smallfolk are hungry, who understands what it is to work a long day at the forge and sleep on a hard bed after. He’ll need a lady, to marry him and keep him company and bear him heirs. One from a Stormlands house would be suitable—Brienne might be able to make a suggestion. You should remind her.”

“I see,” Jaime replies, although he’s still working it out: she’s an odd one, this girl. But he finds himself liking her, despite the lingering suspicion that she’d probably slit his throat before she’d ever smile in his direction. “He wouldn’t prefer a lady from the North?”

Arya laughs at him. “I’m no lady. I told him so, and he understands that, now. So I thought I’d keep him company for a little while, on the way home.”

He nods. “I’ll beg my leave to clean up and join you in the keep, then.”

He watches the two of them, later, over supper with Brienne and Selwyn and Denys. The boy—his resemblance to a young Robert is uncanny, although he doesn’t seem to have inherited much beside the looks, thank gods—is obviously in love, or lust, or both, with Arya, but he doesn’t look tormented about it. They seem to be at peace with whatever pact they’ve made, and parting on good terms. They draw their visit out over two more days, though, so Arya can spend some time with Brienne—they even spar a few times, carefully, and it’s an educational spectacle. Her training’s mostly Braavosi, he thinks—she moves like a fighter accustomed to narrow alleys, swift and economical, striking at close quarters, where her size is an advantage that lets her duck and weave under her opponent’s guard.

After one of their bouts, she corners Jaime again, in the archway where the training yard opens out to the gardens. “She seems happy, with you here,” Arya tells him.

“I know,” he says.

“You’d better keep it that way. Hurt her again, and I’ll sail back across the Sunset Sea just to deal with you.”

He can’t help smiling, even though he knows the threat is genuine. “I don’t intend to give you cause,” he promises. “I hope you’ll grant me parole on that matter, at my word—after all, I was almost your brother-in-law once.”

Arya scoffs. “Might be again,” she says, eyes narrowing, and while he’s still reacting to _that_ , she shrugs. “You were never on my list,” she tells him, and goes, leaving him to ponder a number of things, even after she and Gendry make their farewells the next morning, and leave for Storm’s End.

He asks Brienne about it later, knowing that Arya’s brought her word from Sansa, a letter longer than a raven could carry. “She didn’t mention it, not directly,” Brienne says, looking thoughtful. “I’m not sure that she wished to marry again, although she may be reconciled to it, for the sake of an alliance and heirs for Winterfell. And, well—she trusts your brother, you know. She told me once that he’d never hurt her, even when he had the chance. That may be enough to recommend him, given what she’s experienced at the hands of other men.” Her face darkens, at the thought.

“He’ll be in King’s Landing, though,” Jaime says. “It wouldn’t be easy, a marriage like that, rarely together in the same place.”

“Maybe it suits them that way,” Brienne says, before she gets up and goes to check on her father, while Jaime stays where he’s sitting and keeps on thinking about it. He wonders if Tyrion would be content with that, with a political marriage, and the prospect of heirs—for Casterly Rock as well as Winterfell, he supposes, though how they’d raise them to meet such distant obligations he’s not sure. And Sansa’s ruthless, but she’s beautiful, and clever, too, and Tyrion’s always valued those qualities in women. Jaime thinks about the dark-haired courtesan, the one who’d betrayed him to the point of self-destructive fury at the trial, whom he’d killed, later, in their father’s bed. He knows Tyrion had loved her, before she’d broken his heart, and that he hasn’t had anyone else since—he’d said as much in Winterfell, although Jaime still suspects he’d been halfway in love with the dragon queen at the time. His poor brother, he thinks. For all that Tyrion’s bedded scores more women, Jaime knows he’s the one who’s been granted better luck in love. Especially nowadays.

He’s realized, lately, that he can think of Cersei without rancor now, remember her with love, and a gentle kind of melancholy, but without bitterness. When she comes to his mind unbidden, these days, it’s more often as a girl, blithe and untainted, back at Casterly Rock, or as a young mother, doting on her small children—she’d been happy, then, as much as he’d ever seen her, before they grew old enough to separated from her. He’s not sure what he really believes, about heavens and hells, about what happens to people, innocent or guilty, when they’re dead, but he clings to the hope that somewhere, they’re with her again. It comes to him as an image, sometimes: two tow-headed toddlers and a babe, cradled in her lap, sitting in a grove full of linden trees, in springtime. If he can see them like that, together and smiling in his mind’s eye, he can linger a little to watch, and then walk away, knowing they’re all right. His twin will always be with him, an echo at his side, like the phantom pains in his missing hand, but he can live with it now, peaceably. It doesn't feel like a betrayal, any longer, to take up this new life he’s being offered, to leave them secure in the past.

He gives it another day or two before he presses Brienne for the details of whatever else Sansa’s written regarding the future. They’re sitting on the balcony again, watching the sun dip low over the straits. “She’s offered me the command of her Queensguard,” Brienne says, her eyes on the water, and he tries not to wince at the thought of the fucking North. “Or Bran’s, if I’d rather be in King’s Landing instead—or Duskendale, if that’s where the crown goes in the meantime. But she also assures me that she’ll understand if I choose to remain on Tarth. She's released me from my oath to her, unless and until I choose to make another.”

Jaime tips his head back, looks at the sky. “It’s your choice. Where you go, I intend to follow, if you’ll have me. Winterfell, if that’s what you want.” He hopes his distaste for that option isn’t too obvious. He’s not exactly eager for King’s Landing, either, for a ruined city harboring all his ghosts, although Duskendale wouldn’t be so bad, and his brother would be close. He’s not sure what she wants, and knows that she might still be unsure herself. She’s clearly glad to be home, but he wonders, still, if she’d be happier in a commander’s white cloak—they’ll have to do something about the celibacy oath, but neither Sansa nor Bran would insist—than she would be taking up the burden of her father’s position. She was made for battle, he thinks, although she’d make a fine Evenstar, too. And if the wars are truly ended, now, maybe battle wouldn’t be the best use of her gifts, or his. They’ll find a way to make it work, though, he tells himself. He’s not going to be Gendry Baratheon, looking for a pretty lady to sit at his side while he plays the lord; he’s not going back to Casterly Rock. It’s a relief, to have let go of that so completely, to have finally said a last _no_ to his father and his father’s expectations. He could have fulfilled them, if he’d wanted to, but he’d chosen to follow in Cersei’s wake instead, and despite everything that choice had done to him, to them both, he’s never really doubted his reasons for making it. He’ll be content, he thinks, following in Brienne’s. She’ll put what remains of him to good use, and that’s more than he’d thought he could hope for.

He smiles at her, then. “We could always be hedge knights, if nothing else suits your fancy. Go wandering across the countryside, defending the innocent right and left.”

She laughs, like he hoped she would, although there’s something a little wistful in her eyes. “If you were ten years younger,” she tells him, and he puts on a mock show of offense, until she’s rolling her eyes at him. Then she goes solemn, and says, “It may not be so needful, in future. If they have peace, instead, and the hope of some justice. There might be a better way to fulfill that vow than going about it piecemeal.”

“If there is, you’ll find it,” he tells her, sure of that.

It’s become their custom to take supper with her father and Denys in the solar, unless there are sufficient guests or some occasion to warrant a meal in the hall. Jaime’s started to enjoy it, sharing their unassuming company, even if he’s still a little quiet around Selwyn, not least because he’s pretty sure the man realizes this long courtship isn’t exactly a chaste one. But he doesn’t seem inclined to object, although he watches Jaime carefully, his eyes searching. And Jaime _had_ managed to explain the business with the sapphires, eventually, although he’d done his best to play down the extent of the danger Brienne had been in when he’d come up with that reckless gambit.

“I had a message from my boy today,” Denys is telling Brienne, meaning his son from a brief and long-ago marriage, who crews with a passenger ship out of Essos now. “They’re still on the circuit around Tyrosh and Lys and Lorath and back to the mainland, but he might head this way in a few months’ time, now that the seas are getting quieter. Pirates, I mean, not the weather, although that too.”

“There haven’t been any raids since we got here,” Brienne says. “Unless we’ve missed word of it.”

“With the Greyjoys out of the way, now, it’s a good deal calmer,” Selwyn explains. “There are independent raiders, but with spring coming, they’re probably making more trouble up north these days, around the Fingers and the Bite. We still get the occasional lot out of Sothyros or the Basilisks, but they mostly keep to the Summer Sea, where the pickings are richer.”

“I was thinking,” Jaime says, before he can remember to hesitate, “about that man in—where was it, Crowhaven? With the ingenious machine.”

“Craghaven,” Denys corrects him. “But I had the impression you didn’t think it was a credible scheme.”

“Well, from what you described the thing doesn’t obey the laws of motion as I’m familiar with them, so no. But—it occurs to me there might be some better options, for adapting siege tactics to defend your small ports, especially the ones surrounded by cliffs or high ground. It would take time, and some resources, but assuming those could be found, the countermeasures would make them less appealing targets.”

“Huh. What do you think, my dear?” Selwyn asks, turning to Brienne.

“He’s the one who knows about ending sieges, not me,” she tells her father, and Jaime stifles a grin.

“By one route or another,” he agrees, letting the smile leak out. “But I’m thinking along the lines of some of the things they used on us at Pyke, during the rebellion. Gave us a bloody hard time, for a while. We overcame them, in the end, but we had an army—a few ships of raiders would probably be more daunted by the prospect.”

“Would you be able to reproduce the designs, from memory?” Selwyn asks him, intent.

“I’d need a good draftsman to help—I wouldn’t be able to sketch them myself. But I could describe them to someone who could, if they were clever enough about machinery.”

“Well,” says the Evenstar, “we’ll have to see about finding one.” He gives Jaime an approving nod, then, and the warmth of it does something strange to his chest, especially when he catches Brienne’s quiet smile out of the corner of his eye. The feeling follows him all the way to his chamber, later, then up the stairwell to hers, and into her arms.

“Siege tactics,” she says, her voice fond and a little teasing, while he mouths the nape of her neck and undoes the buttons at the back of her tunic—sending up thanks for the advent of warm weather, it’s _so_ nice not to have to deal with all those bloody Northern layers—and draws it off her shoulders. He grins, turning her around to face him, watching the moonlight spill over all that lovely pale skin. He’s already undressed; she’d made fast work of that the moment he’d walked through the door.

“The fruits of experience,” he tells her, and kisses her and draws her to the waiting bed.

Brienne finds him in the orchard, the following afternoon, watching the bees hum over the opening blossoms. Her face is pensive, like she’s distracted by something else hovering in the air, invisible to him.

“What’s on your mind, Ser?”

She hesitates, looking at the pear trees. Then she says, “My father and Denys, I think they’re…like Renly and Loras were. Together.”

“Hmm,” Jaime says, turning it over in his mind, feeling a number of half-noted observations suddenly slotting into place, the picture becoming whole. “I…think you may be right. Does it—are you bothered, by that?”

She shakes her head, slowly, like she’s still mulling it over. “No, it’s only that…I know he loved my mother, and Sennike, too—I don’t think that was just an arrangement of convenience. It’s surprising, that’s all.”

Jaime shrugs. “It’s not unknown, you know, for someone to like both. It’s actually quite common in Dorne, or so I gather—Oberyn Martell cut quite a swathe through the young men in court, and out of it too, when he was in King’s Landing, but there was no doubt that he was devoted to Ellaria Sand, and she to him.” Gods, the way she’d screamed, when Qyburn’s monster crushed his skull—he’d almost feel sorry for her, when he remembers it, if not for the cruel misdirection of her revenge. But she’s dead, now, and so are her girls; the score is settled, if not all the grief it sowed.

Brienne nods. “I’m glad he hasn’t been alone, all this time. It’s just…a little unexpected, to have to revise your understanding of someone, when you’ve known them your whole life. It’s strange.”

“He seems happy," Jaime tells her. "They both do. The fellow’s got a real talent for administration; he seems like a worthy steward, as well as a good companion.” He pauses, thinking about Duskendale again, or someplace else. “If you don’t want to stay, they’ll manage, and so will Tarth. They’ll be all right.”

Brienne kicks her long legs out in front of her, crossing her ankles, and leans back on the stone bench beside him. “I won’t make you wait much longer, for me to decide. I’m sorry I’ve made you wait this long.”

Jaime shakes his head. “I don’t mind. I’ve been content to wait; I like it here. Take all the time you need.”

She turns to look at him. “I’m not sure it’s time that I need. I’ve been waiting, too, as if I’ll wake up one day certain of the right decision. Do you know—have you thought, any more, about children? What you want? Not just for my sake, but for yours, and that of your house, too, if that’s a concern.”

He sighs. “Yes, I’ve been thinking. Since Tyrion brought it up, in fact, before we left—not directly, he made it about Casterly Rock, but this is what he actually meant.” He’s quiet, for a long time. Eventually, he says, “Sometimes I do want it, very much. For a long time I felt I owed it to them, to their memory, to do the opposite, to deny myself that. But I wouldn’t deny it to you. And it would be a chance to—to do it right, this time. To redeem my worst failure. Although that’s a hell of a burden, to lay on a baby.”

“I’d keep you in line,” she tells him, and he smiles.

“All right. Then yes, if and when you’re ready—since you’d bear the greater share of the burden, at least for the first part of it, and the risk. I’m worried about that, too.” He’s terrified, actually, even though he trusts her strength, the way he trusts the sun to come up in the morning and the sky it brightens to be blue. He couldn’t kill her, the one time he’d tried, and wights and a fucking wall hadn’t, so he’s going to keep faith that nothing else can either. “I’ll leave it to you to decide—unless nature decides it for us first; moon tea’s not a guarantee, you know. You have my promise—any child we make will be acknowledged as mine, and raised as the heir to Tarth if you want it to be. I don’t need to give it a name—the world has had enough Lannisters, and my brother may yet add a few more—only a father.”

Brienne takes his hand, then. “All right,” she says. “Not yet, and not until I can tell my father that we’re sure, for Tarth’s sake. But if we stay, we’ll try, someday.”

Jaime doesn’t know how to say it, what he’s feeling, so he decides to put his mouth to better use instead, and leans in to kiss her, not caring who might see. Let them: they can look all they want to. She’s his lodestar, his lady knight, and wherever the future takes them, he’ll never be lost and wandering, alone in the dark, again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TFW you go from "fuck canon" to "GAY DADS ON TARTH"* in the space of a week and a half. Happy Pride Month, everybody! As always, thanks for reading, and for the comments. Stay tuned for one more chapter, and a brief epilogue.
> 
> *technically bi dads I guess but the above all-caps are what spontaneously generated themselves in my outline after I'd written the first six chapters and had to decide what happened next.


	11. For the Chosen Few (Brienne)

The rain is already coming down sideways by the time they reach the narrow line of steps cut into the cliffside, and Brienne minds her feet and her balance as they make their way down, turning her head to check on Jaime behind her—it won’t do to lose their footing now, with their hands full and the wind picking up. The gusts get stronger as they emerge from the sheltered curve of the promontory and come out onto the rocky point. The stormclouds are massed heavy and low over the sea, blocking out the moon, and the trembling flame of the beacon is the only thing that illuminates the pathway to the lighthouse. They’re both drenched to the skin by the time they make it to the door at the base of the stone tower, and Brienne hears the first clap of thunder echoing outside as they climb the spiral stair within.

“That the oil?” a voice calls down to them, a man whose face she recognizes from the harbor—she can’t recall his name, but he’s always down at the docks—coming into sight above, over the edge of the stairwell.

“Yes,” Brienne shouts back, raising her voice over the wind, “and more coal. There’s another load back at the keep if it's needed.”

“Sorry, my lady, I didn’t realize that was you coming in,” he replies, descending. “I’ll fetch the rest myself; you go on and take those up. Keeper’ll be glad to see you.”

"Thank you," she tells him, and he ducks his head to her and claps a hand on Jaime’s back as he passes them on his way down, his voice trailing up over his shoulder: “You’re about to find out why they call it the Stormlands, Ser!”

“I thought the storms came in autumn,” Jaime says to her, a little breathless, as they reach the top of the stair.

“The worst ones, the big gales out of the southeast, usually do,” she tells him. “But the others come year round—though the spring storms aren’t usually this strong," she adds, when a spray of rain catches her smack in the face as they emerge onto the platform where Gyron, the lighthouse keeper, is barking orders at his apprentice and tending the fire.

“My lady!” he says, as they come round the column of the stairwell and into sight. “That the oil? Gods bless you. Hand it over—no, Jolen, not to you, you’ll spill it all over yourself and go up like a torch. Go help the fellow with the coal.”

Jaime heaves the sack off his shoulder and hands it to the boy, and, after gesturing a question with his hook, rips it open and helps pour the contents into the large scuttle beside the brazier. Gyron retrieves the small barrel of whale oil from Brienne’s hands, keeping it well clear of the flames, and decants it into a stone basin set into the wall.

“Stand back,” he yells, and once they’ve stepped away, he takes a long-handled iron dipper and, wielding it with an expert twist of his wrist, ladles a scoopful onto the fire, which flares up so intensely that she feels the scorch on her face, the brightness imprinting itself on the insides of her eyelids when she blinks.

“That’ll do it,” Gyron says, approvingly. “The coal won’t last the night, though. Did Endrew go to fetch more?”

Brienne nods. “He’s headed up to Evenfall to get the rest. We’ll stay and help here.” Gyron demurs, but he doesn’t put up a fight when she insists; he seems relieved to have some support besides Jolen, who can’t be more than three and ten. So they stay most of the night, taking turns shoveling coal onto the brazier and repositioning the shutters to block the gusts when the wind shifts and keeping watch through a battered spyglass for any ships that might be drifting off course to founder on the rocks. Her left arm and hand start to twinge after the first few hours, but the tumult is enjoyable, somehow—the noise and the shouting and the shared absorption of repetitive, focused action, which gradually wakens a sense of camaraderie: like a battle, almost, against the elements instead of an army.

Jaime seems fascinated by it all, and when the sky starts to break through the clouds just before dawn, the wind finally settling, he follows her back up to Evenfall looking exhausted, but pleased. “Apprentice lighthouse-keeper,” he says, as they strip off and clamber into her bath, their knees knocking. “Not a vocation I’d previously considered pursuing. I’d give a gold dragon to see the look on my brother's face.” His tone is self-mocking, but the smile on his weary face is genuine.

Brienne smiles back, sinking deeper into the steaming water and blessing the chambermaids who’d had the foresight to fill the copper tub before they’d even made their way, filthy and dripping, back through the gates of the keep. “I expect Gyron would be pleased to recruit you,” she tells him. “I’m not sure poor Jolen is up to his standards.”

Jaime chuckles. “I was nearly as clumsy as the boy, at least with the shutters. You seemed to know what you were about, though—another talent you’ve kept secret all this time? Did you make a habit of tending beacon-fires, before you took up the sword?”

“Not all night, through a gale,” she tells him, yawning. “But I’ve been up the tower many times. I was always curious about it, as a child. Once I got bigger, Gyron would set me to keep watch with the spyglass whenever I came, probably to keep me out of the way. And my father often went to lend them a hand during storms—that’s why I thought we might do the same.”

“Well, a hand is all I’ve got, but they’re welcome to it,” he says, grinning, and she can’t help leaning over to kiss him, before reluctantly shoving herself out of the tub and reaching for the towels warming by the fire. Jaime follows suit, yawning deeply, but when she stumbles towards the bed, he starts to pull his damp trousers back on, as if he’s about to head for the door.

“Oh, don’t bother,” she says, climbing in and holding the covers open.

“It’s almost daylight,” he reminds her, swaying on his feet.

“I don’t care,” she tells him, firmly, “and it’s not as if everyone hasn’t guessed. Get those wet things off and come to bed.”

“Yes, Ser,” he says, punctuating it with another yawn, and complies. As soon as he’s tucked himself in beside her, bare and warm, she’s falling, fast asleep before the first rays come creeping across the windowsill.

They manage to wake in time for supper that evening, so Jaime heads back to his chamber to change into clean clothes, kissing her as he goes. Brienne stretches as she pulls on a tunic and light trousers, feeling wonderfully well-rested, barely even sore from the exertions of the night—all the swimming and riding and sparring are definitely helping, she thinks. She smiles, recalling Jaime’s barrage of questions to Gyron whenever the wind quieted—had there been no lighthouse near Lannisport, when he was a boy? Surely there must have been, but maybe mingling with its keepers wasn’t the sort of activity the heir to Casterly Rock had been encouraged, or permitted, to pursue. She’s thankful, again, for the differences in her upbringing. But it hasn’t stopped him from making himself at home here, she thinks, and then her thoughts stray to her choices, the constant drumbeat in her mind: Winterfell; King’s Landing or Duskendale; Evenfall.

Brienne finds herself curiously uneager for Winterfell, though she misses Sansa. She’d been long unused to having close ties with other women, until she'd sworn her oath to the Starks, and while what she feels for Sansa is something less straightforward than friendship—there's admiration, duty, a furious protectiveness—it’s a bond that matters to her deeply. She feels nothing like that sort of affectionate loyalty for Bran, honored though she is by the offer to command his Kingsguard. She wouldn’t be considering it as an alternative at all, if it weren’t for Jaime’s reluctance to return to the North, which is obvious to her despite his equally transparent efforts to downplay it, and the thought that he might be happier with his brother nearby.

It’s been worrying her, a little, the way he’s insisted that the decision is hers alone to make, that he’s content to follow wherever she chooses to go. It’s not like he’s inclined to be passive in any other aspect of their relationship, so his refusal to assert a preference on this point stands out. She doesn’t doubt his love, and she’s grateful that he wants her to make her choice freely. But she can’t help wondering if his complaisance is a partly a form of penance for having hurt her—or a sign of some more essential quality of his character. She hopes he’s not making her into a substitute or a successor for Cersei without realizing it, letting her steer the course for him as his sister had always done. Brienne has to remind herself that there’s nothing wrong with finding it more agreeable to follow, even if you’ve always been told you were meant to lead. After all, she’d often found it easier to pledge her service to others, to let her oaths determine her path, rather than taking on the burden of leadership directly. That’s been changing, gradually, ever since she’d accepted Pod’s allegiance, and as she’d grown more confident of her authority over the Northern troops serving under her command. But she’d still led them in Sansa’s name, not her own.

On her way up to supper, the maester’s apprentice hands her a raven scroll—word from Pod, saying that he and Rosmund have finally reached his family’s hall near Ashemark. The wedding’s a month hence, and they’ll linger another month or two after that, before they set out again to come join her. It sets the drum in her head beating once more: she’ll have to let them know, soon, whether to head for Tarth, or someplace else.

She mentions the message over their meal, once Jaime’s done recounting the story of their efforts overnight at the lighthouse. Her father’s heard plenty about Pod, over the years, but it’s a chance to tell Denys about him, too, and offer what vague recollections she can muster of Rosmund—one of the ladies she’d seen often in Sansa’s solar, or exchanged an occasional word with over the table in Winterfell.

“Pod will make a fine knight, with another year or two of her training,” Jaime adds, when she's done. “He’s a good lad. And a remarkably good singer, too, for someone untrained. Did you know that, before?” he asks, turning to Brienne.

She smiles. “Yes,” she tells them, “he used to get bored, on horseback, and start a song to pass the time. I kept having to remind him to take care not to reveal us to anyone in pursuit. Also I’m not sure he realized, at first, what a few of the lyrics he picked up among the Westerlands armies were actually about.” She hadn’t understood some of the entendres herself, until she’d heard them sung again by tongues less innocent than Pod’s, after they’d joined up with the men of the Night’s Watch. She averts her eyes from Jaime’s, lest his glance make her blush.

“It would be pleasant, to have someone else around who can hold a tune,” says Denys, with a sidelong smirk at her father, who’s even worse at it than she is. “Does he know any of the great old songs, or just bawdy camp ballads?”

“He gave us a valiant rendition of ‘Jenny of Oldstones’ the night of the Battle of Winterfell, an hour or so before it began,” Jaime says. “Had the stout Ser Davos very nearly in tears, I'd say. Though we were all rather…in odd spirits, at the time, what with the battle looming, and having been drinking to celebrate Ser Brienne’s knighthood.”

“Ah! Yes, I heard it was you who knighted her,” Denys says.

Brienne sees Jaime hesitate, almost imperceptibly, before responding. “It was. One of the better decisions I’ve made in this life, I think. Though I ought to have done it far sooner.”

“Why didn’t you?” asks her father.

Jaime looks a little embarrassed, even though Selwyn’s tone isn’t accusatory—he’s genuinely curious to hear the answer.

“To be honest, I’m afraid it didn’t occur to me before then. It all happened spontaneously—my brother was praising the past feats of those gathered by the fire, you see, to lift our spirits before the battle, and called her Ser without thinking of it, before he caught himself. And this huge ginger fellow of a wildling, _quite_ the admirer”—Brienne laughs, thinking of Tormund and his ridiculous horn of milk—“was outraged to discover that she wasn’t actually a knight, and I realized, then and there, that I could rectify the error myself.” Jaime pauses. “It was true already, though, long before I made it real. Catelyn Stark said as much, the night we met—I was in chains, at the time; not a very auspicious beginning. ‘She’s a truer knight than you’ll ever be,’ those were her words.” He smiles, then, his eyes clear and steady. “Lady Stark and I were rarely in accord, but she had the right of it, then.”

Watching his face, in that moment, Brienne feels like the lighthouse beacon is inside her chest. She knows it’s got to be obvious, the way they’re looking at each other now. The way they’d looked at each other that night, in the firelight, when she rose to her feet before him, everyone else in the room forgotten until the applause broke through. She’ll never forget it, not as long as she lives; she’ll cherish the memory all the way to her grave. _It might be the truest thing I ever did_ , she remembers him saying. Her father must be able to see it on her face, what she’s feeling, and she hopes he can see it on Jaime's, too; that he understands the truth of what’s here now, alive and real, between them.

The moment passes, but the flame’s still burning inside her when Jaime comes to her chamber, later, and she can see that it’s alight in him too. When they come together, it’s with an intensity that hasn’t gripped them since Winterfell, and while she’s cherished the gentle, comfortable pattern they've found in bed lately, this is a welcome inferno. They’re both caught up in it, fevered and gasping, seeking and testing their limits. After he’s licked and sucked and stroked her to a frenzy—shuddering, then soaring—she pins him to the bed and uses her mouth on him and watches as it drives him to distraction, every line of his body tense and beautiful under her hands. At some point he regains the upper hand, and then he’s thrusting into her with bruising force, no longer afraid to mark her, sure of her strength. There’s laughter in it, too, both playful teasing and an exhilarated relief. They spark the flames again and again, until they’ve burned up every scrap of kindling, and then they lie damp and entwined in exhausted delight, holding sleep at bay just a little longer so they can treasure the feeling.

Late the next morning, once they’ve finally roused themselves, Jaime invites her to spar again—“with swords, this time,” he says, grinning as she throws a pillow at him—and even though she _is_ a little sore from the night’s exertions, it’s still a pleasure to chase him around the ring and pay him back for his teasing. It reminds her that she can also have this, too, can still put her body to its accustomed use. Even if the peace holds, and there’s never any need of it, she’ll be ready if she’s called to battle again someday.

Afterwards, Jaime gets drawn into a lengthy conversation with the new master-at-arms, which somehow ends up with him being invited to help train the young boys around Evenfall—and perhaps a few young girls, he adds, with a speaking glance in her direction—who show some signs of potential talent for wielding a sword. It hits her, then, that he’s starting to build a life in this place, a life beside hers, in a way that he hadn’t in Winterfell, that he maybe never could have there. _He seemed happy there,_ Tyrion had said, but she can see that it’s different, the way he’s happy now, here. _He was happy with you._ And she’s realized something else, recently, the truth of it gradually revealing itself to her, like a flower opening: that being happy with Jaime is what makes it possible for her to imagine being happy as the Evenstar. She could do it without him, if she had to, do it as her duty, if not her desire. But she doesn’t have to make that choice. _You don’t have to bear it alone,_ she thinks. And that’s what makes it possible to say yes, and mean it: yes to both, inseparable, a life she can see made whole.

She keeps the decision to herself, harbored like a secret, for another day—turning it over in her mind, tapping it against her heart, to be sure. And then she goes and finds him in the orchard again, smiling under the pear trees, looking happy where he’s planted.

“I want to stay,” she tells him. “Will you stay here, with me?”

Jaime laughs. “Gods, yes. I’m _so_ glad it’s not going to be Winterfell.” He gets up, then, coming to gather her in his arms, and kisses her like it’s a promise.

“I’ll still want to go visit,” she tells him, once she’s disentangled herself. “Not every year, but as often as I can spare time for the journey. If you can’t stand it, though, you could stay here while I'm gone.”

“For two months or more, without you? No, my lady. Besides, I’d quite like to take ship with you again. I’d gladly put up with the rest of it, just for that part.”

She smiles at him. “We’d sail to White Harbor next time, most likely, so more of the journey would be by sea. Although we could stop to see your brother on the way.”

“Unless _he’ll_ be visiting Winterfell, too,” Jaime says, with a speculative frown. “It might make for a rather disconcerting reunion.” But he shrugs off the thought, and starts grinning at her again. “No matter. I told you, Ser: where you go, I’ll follow, as long as you’ll have me. I’ll be the better for it, even when I’m freezing my balls off in the North.” As she lets him tow her back towards the keep, laughing, the thought comes to her that maybe it hadn't been his devotion to Cersei that had warped him— _we don’t get to choose who we love_ —so much as the deceit and dishonor it had necessarily implied. She doesn’t think he’ll follow her mindlessly; on some level, she knows, he loves her because she sees a good man in him, and his choice to claim that love and return it is something like an act of faith: the decision to live as if he might be, even in the midst of his doubt.

She tells her father that afternoon, and her heart seizes at the happiness on his face, mingled with no small measure of pride and relief. He calls Denys in to share the news and make plans for a public announcement of the succession. Brienne hastily quashes the proposal of a ball, but agrees to put up with a feast, perhaps, during the spring festival that’s sure to be held before long, with the way the season’s taking hold. She sits back, then, falling silent, and lets the two of them discuss of the details, noting the comfortable tenor of their exchanges, the way Denys is closely attuned to Selwyn, anticipating his need for a fresh quill, a cup of water, a reassuring word. She thinks her father has realized by now that she knows what he and Denys are to one another, although they’ve never spoken of it directly. And while she’s not ready to contemplate too closely the prospect of a time when he’s gone— _five more years_ , she prays, _grant me that at least_ —she knows she’ll find some way, long before then, to tell Denys that he’ll always have a place at Evenfall, _and meat and mead at my table_ , that this hearth is his, too, as long as he wants it to be.

After breakfast the next morning, as she and Jaime are wandering across the courtyard and into the empty armory, she makes a suggestion. “I was thinking that next month, we might ride the circuit with Denys—or even let him stay here with my father, and do it ourselves in his place. I want to show you the rest of the isle, especially the mountains, and some of the quarries and ports out on the eastern shore. You could go and see Craghaven, and think about ingenious machines.”

“I’d like that,” Jaime tells her, turning to look back at her from the rack where he’s picking out a practice sword. “And your people ought to see you, now, so they can start to know who you’ve become. See what you’ll be for them, one day.”

“I’d like them to see you, too,” she says, “at my side.”

“If you think they’ll be glad to see a derelict old knight from the Westerlands there.”

“Not just as a knight,” Brienne tells him, her heart thudding in her chest, making it hard for her to say the rest of the words—but he hears it, the part that’s unspoken, and crosses the room to her, slow and reverent, the sword still in his hand, and goes to his knees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took so long to get this chapter posted—I was traveling and beset by other obligations for much of the past week, and also ended up taking a bit of a research detour on the topic of late medieval and early modern lighthouse infrastructure (although I make no promises of historical accuracy).Thank you again for reading and for all the kind comments!


	12. Epilogue: The Lilies that Bloom (Jaime)

_Evenfall, six months later._

Jaime hears the newcomers arrive before he sees them ride in. He’s in the courtyard, sleeves rolled up, helping Bryce and Hareth unload a cartful of barrels sent down from a brewery in the mountains, and looking forward to having a taste of the ale once they’re done. It’s high spring on Tarth now, nearly nine months into the season, and the weather’s grown almost summerlike down here on the coast. The trees in the orchard are starting to bear fruit, and the first poppies are already dying in the gardens, the bluebells and lilies blooming in their place. 

There’s a sudden commotion occurring at the gates—shouts of greeting and the sound of hooves, then a saddle creaking as someone dismounts—and as soon as he recognizes Podrick’s voice, he comes round the cart and sees Pod helping a lovely dark-haired girl down from her horse.

“Ser Jaime!” Pod hails him, as Jaime crosses the yard to greet them. “I’m glad to find you here.”

“Welcome to Tarth, Ser Podrick,” he says, cheerful. “I hope you like fish.”

Pod laughs. “May I introduce you to Rosmund, my lady wife?”

Jaime bows to the girl, and looks over his shoulder as he hears Brienne’s eager steps come clattering down the stairs behind him. She sails out of the archway, elated, and he turns back to Pod and Rosmund, then, feeling a grin spread across his face.

“If I may introduce you to mine.”

Pod just gapes at the two of them for a moment, before an answering grin takes over his features and—apparently forgetting every bit of knightly decorum she’s managed to bash into him over the years—he throws his arms around Brienne in a lopsided, exuberant embrace. Jaime watches her chin wobble as she tries not to cry; he suspects Pod’s never done this before. He hadn’t seen it happen, anyway, not even in Winterfell after they’d survived the battle with the dead, nor when they’d parted almost a year ago at the docks back in King’s Landing.

Pod releases her, and claps a hand to Jaime’s shoulder. “Congratulations, Sers,” he tells them, still beaming.

Brienne calls Hareth over to help carry their luggage into the keep, and Jaime studies her glowing face, notes how the sunlight gets caught in her straw-colored lashes and glints among the close-cropped hairs at her nape, just like it had that day on the Kingsroad when she’d scowled at the sight of a bumbling young squire who didn’t know whether to call her “Ser” or “my lady.” And now the boy is a young man with a beard and a wife, and Brienne smiles as often as she scowls, and both of them are true knights, alive to see the spring.

Once the luggage and horses are sorted, they take Pod and Rosmund up to the solar to meet Selwyn and Denys, and as everyone gets caught up on the news of the past year, it becomes apparent there’s even more recent news, since Pod’s last message when they'd set out from Ashemark two months after the wedding. “We didn’t realize until we were already halfway to Storm’s End,” Rosmund says with a faint blush, and he sees, now, how the curve of her belly is clearly rounded under her gown. 

“Well,” Brienne says, biting back a smile, “it’s a good thing the chambers we’ve readied for you have got room to spare.” 

Podrick Payne, a _father_ —gods, what a thought. Tyrion’s going to howl. It makes Jaime feel positively ancient. He says as much, later, to Brienne, back in their chambers—their chambers, their bed; he’s still not over the pleasure he takes in the sound of word _ours_ —and she laughs. He’s not over the sound of that, either, even though he hears it more days than not, now. “Me too,” she tells him. She’s quiet for a moment, gazing out the window, and then she looks back at him, steady and smiling. “I was thinking—it looks like the spring’s going to last for some time. And that it’s a good season, for starting new things. New lives.”

Jaime smiles back at her, and looks over to their bed, where the last of the evening light spills warm onto the sheets. “Well, there’s no time like the present,” he says, and lets her laughter wash over him, as she comes and takes his hand, drawing him to her, and he follows where she goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've come this far—because I sure didn't plan to write nearly forty thousand words when I first came up with an image of two idiot knights yelling at each other on a boat—thank you for making the journey with them. I hope it was worth your time.


End file.
